I just did a large conference call with DLC elected officals from around the country, and picked up a couple of interesting tidbits:
(1) One influential Iowa Dem said Democrats”absolutely cleaned their clocks” in early voting in that state.
(2) Another influential Dem from South Florida reported that minorities weren’t the only ones to heavily participate in early voting there; the “condo vote”–strongly pro-Democratic elderly voters in places like Broward County–also heavily voted early, with Dem operatives on hand with chairs and bottled water to help participants deal with long waiting lines.

Now there are two federal court rulings in Ohio declaring the state’s law allowing party reps to challenge voter eligibility at the polls unconstitutional, as a judge in Akron echoed a Cincinnati judge’s ruling late last night. GOPers are still trying to get a federal appeals court to intervene and overturn the rulings, but now they won’t have the excuse of divergent decisions at the district court level.
For once, maybe the good guys will be able to run out the clock.

If you’ve gotten as obsessed as I am about the legal and political maneuverings over voter suppression in the Buckeye State, you should be aware there’s now a blog up totally devoted to the topic.

Political scientist Bill Binning of Youngstown State University told USA Today that Kerry has a good chance to win Ohio, but then said: “I don’t know if it’s going to be within the margin of litigation.”
Pretty funny, eh? Funny like Moe hitting Larry in the head with a mallet.

The legal situation with respect to GOP plans to challenge Democratic and/or minority voters in Ohio and elsewhere has gotten as frenzied as the election itself.
In the wee hours of this morning, Ohio federal district judge Susan Dlott ruled that the state’s law allowing party representatives to challenge voter eligibility at the polls is unconstitutional. Even though the suit only involved voter challenges in Hamilton County (Cincinatti), the constitutional ruling would, if it stands, ban such challenges statewide. A separate ruling by a different federal judge is expect today, involving Summit County (Akron). The state GOP, natch, is asking the federal court of appeals to reverse Dlott’s ruling, and could be aided in the appeal if there’s a different outcome in the Summit case.
Meanwhile, in a separate case with potential national impact, a federal judge in New Jersey will hold a hearing today on a Democratic suit alleging that the GOP’s voter challenges in Ohio and other states violate a 1981 consent order by the national Republican Party agreeing to abandon such efforts in the future, after evidence the GOP had engaged in minority voter intimidation in the Garden State.
Litigation this close to election day is obviously unusual, but better now than on November 3.

It’s no secret that many people in both campaigns think that Wisconsin could turn out to be the ballgame, and that’s probably why the GOP is becoming most brazen in the Cheese State in voter supression strategies.
Having been slam-dunked by Milwaukee officials who ruled against their effort to challenge thousands of mainly-minority voters in that city, Republicans have ramped up their claims to argue that 37,000 Milwaukee voters are registered with erroneous or non-existent addresses.
Their case, like the one they lost last week, is based on the very questionable tactic–the one that led to a judicial consent agreement ruling this out back in the 1980s–of sending mail to targeted minority voters and representing undeliverable mail as indicating voter fraud.
In other words, having lost the legal case, the Wisconsin GOP is resorting in a big way to a political case that it’s justified in challenging minority voters in Wisconsin, and in tainting any adverse result in the state.

Want another piece of evidence that Republicans believe pre-election spinning is important? Check out WaPo’s “crystal ball” feature today, providing projections from “experts” about what’s going to happen on Tuesday.
Republican spinmeisters Tony Snow, Bill Kristol and Ann Coulter all predicted historic GOP landslides: Bush by five percent, and well over 300 in electoral votes, supplemented by big Republican gains in Senate, House and gubernatorial contests. Democratic pundit Donna Brazile, by contrast, predicted a narrow Kerry win, and small Democratic gains elsewhere.
Brazile’s being honest if optimistic. Snow, Kristol and Coulter are just spinning.

In case you missed it, check out Friday’s New Dem Daily for a list of scary things in honor of Halloween.

ABC’s Note today reports that despite widespread agreement among pollsters that the presidential contest is too close to call nationally, and too close to call in the key battleground states, the Bushies are exuding more confidence than they were a week ago. Their reasoning, at least publicly, is that the Osama video has changed the dynamics of the race at the perfect time for Bush, reminding voters that the bad man still wants to kill us all.
I have no way of knowing if they really believe this stuff, but I do know that Karl Rove and company strongly believe in the self-fulfilling prophecy theory of acting like a winner before and after the polls close. And I also know they are playing into the media Conventional Wisdom that the last-minute disclosures about Bush’s Maine DWI erased the Republican’s lead in the final stages of the 2000 campaign.
Most of the evidence I’ve seen (sorry, no links here, since the polling and analysis is mostly long gone on the internet) suggests that undecided voters down the stretch in 2000 broke towards Bush, not Gore, and that Gore’s strong finish was attributable to a big advantage in the ground game that polls didn’t and couldn’t pick up, reinforced to some extent by Gore’s reluctant decision to finally begin campaigning on his own administration’s record.
The New York Times’ Kirk Johnson penned a report today suggesting the Osama video isn’t having much of a visible impact, and I’m inclined to agree (Ruy Teixeira reviews the polling evidence and reaches the same conclusion). It will probably come down to the ground game again, along with the tendency of undecided voters to break against the incumbent. Since nobody seems to dispute that Democrats have the most expensive and expansive GOTV operation in American political history, Bush’s chances come down to his elaborate effort to win unpredented margins in rural and exurban areas, based on the 2002 Republican model of demanding personal loyalty to the president, and of accentuating sharp and often false differences between the candidates on national security and cultural issues.
Every incumbent running for re-election uses the trappings of the presidency on the campaign trail, but BC04 has really taken this to a whole new level. I instinctively reject the partisan tendency to attribute un-American and anti-democratic tactics to the opposition, but it’s impossible to avoid smelling the whiff of authoritarianism in the incumbent’s campaign events.
The personal pledge of loyalty to Bush that’s become a staple of his home-stretch rallies is one example. The exclusion of Democrats, the routine taunting of news media, and the tight security is another. And the heavy-handed overtone of patriotic and religious appeals is still another.
I must say that the fervent response to these tactics surprises me. I can understand how some voters can rationally make a decision that Bush has done as well as he can on domestic and international issues, or that Kerry’s record doesn’t make him a desirable alternative. I can understand that some Americans really do believe that abortion is homicide, or that Republicans empathize with traditionalist cultural impulses more than Democrats, or even that Bush as a self-professed evangelical Christian has earned their support by rhetoric alone. There may even be a small percantage of voters who are convinced that erasing progressive tax rates and “starving the beast” of Washington by deliberately engineering budget deficits are valid and important goals. But that George W. Bush, of all people, has become the object of a cult of personality and of intense personal devotion for millions of Americans is harder to understand. Most of the serious conservative ideologues I talk to privately concede the president is a man of limited gifts who has united Republicans behind him as a matter of historical accident more than his intrinsic political or policy skills.
But whatever its provenance, it’s clear the ability of the president’s campaign to break every record of “base” support, while creating a polarized atmosphere essential to justifying extraordinarily partisan election-day and post-election day tactics, is the slender reed on which his whole enterprise now depends. That’s why everybody even remotely connected to the Bush effort will be spinning like mad over and beyond the next 48 hours.

In addition to growing press coverage of various efforts to suppress or intimidate voters, especially in heavily Democratic and/or minority areas, I’m getting a lot of email from attentive readers citing this or that development, most of it in battleground states like Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
It’s probably useful, at this point, to separate these developments into three categories:
(1) Good ol’ fashioned dirty tricks. As Jo Becker and David Finkel report in this morning’s WaPo: “Dirty tricks are a staple of campaigns, but election officials say this year’s could achieve new highs in numbers and new lows in scope, especially in key battleground states such as Florida and Ohio.” As usual, many of the nasty tactics are aimed at minority voters, which gives you a pretty good idea where they are coming from. In Leon County, Florida, thousands of students at (historically black) Florida A&M University and at FSU are discovering that their addresses have been changed on registration lists, possibly disqualifying them from voting. In Milwaukee, mysterious fliers are appearing in African-American neighborhoods telling voters they cannot participate on Tuesday if they voted earlier in the year. In Charleston, South Carolina, a dirty tactic used in Maryland in 2002 re-emerged, with a fake NAACP letter warning voters they can be arrested if they show up at the polls owing parking tickets or in arrears on child support payments. And in Ohio, another fake letter “informs” voters registered by the NAACP that their registrations have proved invalid, and that they face legal sanctions if they vote. It goes on and on.
(2) Official malfeasance. There’s also a noticable upsurge in major screwups–due either to incompetence or malice–by election officials. One reader informed me on Friday that the (Republican-controlled) Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania election board suddenly announced changes in polling locations for 21 precincts, affecting as many as 15,000 voters in one of the hottest battleground areas of the country. There have been widespread delays in the mailing and processing of both new voter registrations and absentee ballots, along with poor preparations for places where early votes can be cast. It’s impossible to know in many of these case if the blunders are unintentional or designed to put a thumb on the scales, but they reinforce how little progress has been made since 2000 in creating an efficient and even playing field for voters.
(3) Voter intimidation. We won’t know for sure until Tuesday how far the GOP will go in wholesale challenges to voters in heavily Democratic precincts, but so far, they are winning the obscure legal battle over the rules for casting and counting the “provisional” ballots required by the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in cases where voters’ eligibility is in question. Michigan will apparently be the only battleground state where voters who are residents of the county, not the precinct, where they show up to vote will have their votes counted. That may be why last-minute changes in precinct boundaries and polling places seem to be happening.
Meanwhile, the high-stakes maneuvering over voter challenges in Ohio continues. As I cynically (but accurately) predicted on Friday, Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell’s noble-sounding “instruction” to Attorney General Jim Petro that he ban voter challenges altogether went nowhere, as Petro quickly denied he had the authority to take that step. On a more marginal issue, a federal judge overruled Blackwell’s earlier ruling that official partisan challengers could be apportioned to concentrate them at particular polling places within precincts. Unfortunately, it’s not the number of challengers, but the number of challenges, that matters.
Finally, there’s an aspect of the voter challenge/provisional ballot maneuvering that should be kept in mind. Provisional ballots will not be counted on Election Night; most states will allow up to ten days for them to be resolved and either counted or discarded.
If you remember how important it was to the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2000 to claim victory in Florida from the get-go, it’s entirely possible that a part of its strategy this year is to get the maximum number of Democratic votes in very close states made provisional, so that Bush will be “ahead” in the count the morning after. I certainly hope that impartial election officials, Democratic poll watchers, and journalists pay close attention to the number of provisional ballots that are pending in key states, and to deny possible Republican victory claims based on initial counts.
With most tracking polls showing the race dead even going into the final 48 hours, this sort of stuff, murky as it is, could be crucial.
UPCATEGORY: Ed Kilgore’s New Donkey
My own information about the exit poll operations this year suggests (a) the exits will be done very professionally, and (b) it’s very likely that despite the best efforts of the sponsors, they will be leaked on election day in a way that minimizes word-of-mouth distortions, and that will be all over the internet within hours if not minutes. Be forewarned.