One day out, Chris Bowers, who has followed Senate race polls closely at Open Left, is predicting a solid 7-seat pick-up for Dems. In his analysis, based on poll averages, he explains:

Polling shows that we are going to win Alaska, Colorado, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Virginia. Polling, plus huge early voting numbers, shows that we are going to win North Carolina and Oregon, too. Given that we aren’t going to lose any seats, that makes seven pickups. Overall, that gives Democrats 57 seats (with Sanders), plus maybe Lieberman, plus Biden as a tie-breaker. That will be enough to pass Obama’s agenda.

Bowers sees MN as “a real toss-up,” but has doubts about Martin winning a run-off in GA. (But hey, what if Obama and Sam Nunn campaign hard for him?)

In the counting-chickens-before-they-hatch department today, Politico’s Mike Allen has the first of what will soon be many comprehensive reports on the early buzz about key cabinet and staff appointments in an Obama Administration.
Get used to ignoring these things, for a while at least. Team Obama’s famously leak-proof character means there’s unlikely to be any hard information on their staffing plans until they are just about ready to be publicly disclosed. It also means that most “predictions” will be the result of uninformed if rational speculation, or worse yet, of self-promotion by candidates for high office who seek to offset their lack of influence with Obama by stimulating Beltway buzz.
Looking over Allen’s list, I see several that just leap off the page as laughably improbable. Within Obama’s campaign and transition operations, there are certainly plenty of veterans of the Clinton administration who remember the damage self-inflicted in late 1992 by public jockeying for jobs among Democrats. I seriously doubt we see anything like that if Barack Obama wins the presidency tomorrow.

While channel surfing very early this morning, I dwelled for a moment at Fox, and heard the usual cawing about the presidential race tightening. But unless I’m mistaken, the pre-spin there seemed half-hearted, as did the talk about an obscure Obama relative living in the country illegally.
We’re now finally at the point where polls have told us everything they have to say, and here’s Nate Silver’s assessment as of 3:00 a.m. today:

McCain’s clock has simply run out. While there is arguable evidence of a small tightening, there is no evidence of a dramatic tightening of the sort he would need to make Tuesday night interesting.
Related to this is the fact that there are now very, very few true undecideds left in this race. After accounting for a third-party vote, which looks as though it will come in at an aggregate of 2 percent or so…I am showing only about 2.7 percent of the electorate left to allocate between the two major-party candidates. Even if John McCain were to win 70 perecnt of the remaining undecideds (which I don’t think is likely), that would only be worth a net of about a point for him. Frankly, McCain’s winning scenarios mainly involve the polls having been wrong in the first place — because of a Bradley Effect or something else. It is unlikely that the polls will “tighten” substantially further — especially when Obama already has over 50 percent of the vote.

When it comes to the state-by-state contests, the situation is even clearer. All of the states that seem to be close at the end of this campaign–FL, MO, OH, NV, NC, IN and VA–are states that John McCain must carry. But even if he carries them all, he still loses.
To sum it all up, if McCain somehow wins, it will produce the largest demolition of the public opinion research profession since Dewey and Truman 60 years ago–perhaps even larger, since the two national pollsters of that era didn’t bother to test opinion during the last week in 1948.

Avi Zenilman’s Politico article. “Dems’ Firewall: Secretary of State Offices,” reports on a largely overlooked story of campaign ’08. As Zenilman explains it,

In anticipation of a photo-finish presidential election, Democrats have built an administrative firewall designed to protect their electoral interests in five of the most important battleground states.
The bulwark consists of control of secretary of state offices in five key states — Iowa, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico and Ohio — where the difference between victory and defeat in the 2004 presidential election was no more than 120,000 votes in any one of them.

Dem secretaries of state in battleground states are now “better positioned” to prioritize voter registration and increase turnout and perhaps more importantly, to interpret and administer election law, adds Zenilman. His article spotlights the big difference Ohio Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has made in making it hard for Republicans to steal votes this year, and Seyward Darby has more on Brunner’s efforts in his New Republic article , “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.”
Zenilman credits an independent 527 group, The Secretary of State (“SOS”) Project for raising $500,000 that helped win ’06 secretary of state races for Democrats, along with ActBlue, which contributed $24,000 to help elect Democrat Mary Herrera to the SOS post in NM. The Project sees a good chance to elect Dem SOS candidates tomorrow in MO, MT, OR and WV.

I tried to vote at 8:00 a.m on Wednesday at an early voting location in downtown Decatur, Georgia. I waited for ten minutes or so in a long, fairly chaotic line in a parking garage. Everyone seemed to be having a good time of it, chattering away and drinking coffee. But the cold that penetrated my flimsy jacket and fear of a parking ticket ran me off. I’m told those who stayed waited about 2 hours. Later in the day I looked into the voting by mail option, but decided against it because the available information I got about deadlines seemed contradictory.
I lined up to vote early the next day at a different poll at an abandoned mall, where parking was less of a hassle, and cast my ballot exactly an hour later. The feeling at this poll was very different than the party-like atmosphere of my experience the day before and from that described in other accounts I’ve read.
There wasn’t much chatter and nobody I could hear was joking or otherwise cutting up. Instead there was a mood of solemnity and a seriousness of purpose I’ve never before sensed at the polls, almost like church. A long line of several hundred people, 99 percent African Americans, snaked around inside an abandoned T.J. Maxx, partitioned into a couple of narrow, sheet-rocked halls. There were a lot of young voters, but few elderly people in the line.
There were volunteers posted every 30 feet or so, carefully checking i.d.’s, initialing ballot applications, collecting and distributing clipboards and pens, keeping people in single file and running a very tight ship in general. The volunteers, all African Americans, were courteous and businesslike. The walls inside the halls were full of sample ballots and other voting information. When I got to the comparatively small voting room, there was an extra checking process, also run by efficient volunteers with computers.
The scene reminded me of James Orange, MLK’s march organizer and Atlanta’s top GOTV activist, who died early this year. I wouldn’t be surprised if the organizers of this particular poll were Orange-trained volunteers. Orange had worked hard for Obama, and if Obama wins Georgia, much if not most of the cred should go to Orange-trained volunteers, who are now mobilizing a record Black voter turnout in the peach state. I got a little dewy-eyed thinking about Orange’s legacy being played out so beautifully, how he worked his whole life for Black political empowerment and how he would celebrate Obama’s victory. I imagine hundreds of his co-workers are feeling the same way these days.
I felt a flash of what I hope was paranoia, when I saw the voting machines because they were all Diebold branded. But the touch screen voting machines worked fine, and no one seemed to be having problems with them. However, there should have been twice or triple the number of machines. This is where I think a lot of vote suppression is implemented, not only the inadequate number of polling places Ed cited yesterday, but also in the shortage of machines in minority precincts. I cast my ballot but got no written receipt confirming my choices. Still, it felt like the most important ballot I’ve ever cast.
President-elect Obama will take the oath of office and deliver his inaugural address the day after the national holiday marking MLK’s 80th birthday anniversary. I’m sure President Obama will credit Dr. King and the movement he lead for making his presidency possible. It will be an especially sweet day for the ‘community organizers’ who were dissed at the GOP convention, and I know Rev. Orange’s spirit will still be with us as we begin organizing for the 2010 mid-term elections the next day.

One of the theories behind the proliferation of liberalized early voting is that it will reduce the risk of overwhelmed voting systems on Election Day itself. But this year early voting is being plagued by inadequate numbers of voting places and poll workers, long lines, and system breakdowns. Here’s a disturbing assessment from Evan Perez in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal:

Millions of voters are braving long lines, delays of two to four hours and sometimes confusing rules to cast their ballots ahead of Tuesday’s election….
At polling stations near Miami, residents have endured waits up to four hours in relatively cold 50-degree weather. Florida and North Carolina have extended polling hours to accommodate large crowds. In Georgia, officials report that more than a quarter of all voters have already cast ballots, despite scattered voting-machine malfunctions that at one station kept people waiting in line until after midnight.

As J.P. Green noted here a few days ago, much of this situation is attributable to Republican-administered election systems, and is disporportionately affecting minority voters. And even if it’s not directly attributable to conscious voter suppression, the only alternative explanation is incompetence born of indifference, or of cynical assumptions about the civic engagment of minority citizens.
It’s also a situation that begs for a national solution, if not this year, then as soon as is possible. In a Washington Post op-ed last week, Christopher Edley Jr. made a simple but elegant case for action:

In 2001, former presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford led a commission, of which I was a member, to dissect the previous year’s voting fiasco in Florida. Many of our recommendations found their way into the Help America Vote Act of 2002. Disappointingly, Congress failed to create an explicit and easily enforceable prohibition against grossly disproportionate resource allocations between polling places in the same state or even the same county — the level of government at which, preposterously, we typically finance and administer elections. This localism means that the infrastructure of democracy vies for resources with potholes, parks, sheriffs and firefighting. It also means that locally powerful communities get better service on something that — above all else — is supposed to be scrupulously equal in this country.
Even without a new statute, there are enough plausible legal theories on this to boggle the mind. Voting is a fundamental right, but as I saw on the Carter-Ford commission and again as a member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, Election Day resource disparities have enormously different racial and class impacts that are based on the dynamics of power and poverty. In election cycle after cycle, registrars act surprised when problems crop up disproportionately in poor neighborhoods. If there isn’t enough money to run decent elections everywhere, Americans should share the pain equally.
We have the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution, with a rich history of helpful Supreme Court rulings, including even Bush v. Gore’s solicitude in 2000 for Florida voters being treated differently and arbitrarily in the administration of elections. We have the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Individual states have their own constitutional provisions guaranteeing “equal protection” and “due process,” so state attorneys general can and should add pressure.

I’m all for lawyering up on Election Day if the absurd and discriminatory inadequacy of voting administration matches what we’ve seen both in the past, and in some of the early voting sites. But without question, if despite the best efforts of the GOP we wind up with a Democratic president and a strongly Democratic Congress next Tuesday, true election reform at the national level finally needs to happen.