election day

Forget the claims of voter fraud, like Disney characters and dead people voting. The real problem in this election is likely to be not that ineligible people show up to vote, but that lots of eligible voters never make it through the long lines and bureaucratic hurdles to cast ballots on Election Day.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow [...]

CHICAGO, Ill. — Walking through Sen. Barack Obama’s national headquarters last night, it was striking to see how quiet things were on election eve.
The downtown office building was filled with operatives working late into the night, though the ranks were thinned because some people were deployed to the field. But most people looked remarkably calm. [...]

The Obama campaign is intensifying its YouTube outreach in the closing days of the election, stacking its official channel with as many as 10 new, high-quality videos a day.
Some spots are short, upbeat videos aiming for mass appeal. This week’s viral hit, “Make History,” for example, broke into YouTube’s top 10 this week. With peppy [...]

Maybe there’s too much caffeine coursing through the Obama campaign’s new media department. Or maybe they’ve just had it with Sen. John McCain’s robocalls about Bill Ayers.
The latest item on Sen. Barack Obama’s official YouTube channel is a wacky, dorky, irreverent video titled, really, “Robots Attack!”
Wonder why they didn’t use this in the prime-time [...]

During an interview on MSNBC this morning, GOP strategist Mike Murphy — who helmed Sen. John McCain’s 2000 primary bid — said the McCain campaign was “smoking crack” if it is still clinging to hopes of winning Iowa, according to The Page. Murphy also referred to Virginia as “the hole in the boat” for the [...]

On Friday, I noted how the Obama campaign was happily circulating an Associated Press article reporting that President George W. Bush, in a break with tradition, would not vote on camera this Election Day.

A pair of polls released today indicate Sen. John McCain’s prospects for victory in the absolutely must-win state of Ohio may be growing dimmer.
The results of Quinnipiac University’s newest battleground surveys show McCain trailing Sen. Barack Obama by a whopping 14-percentage points in the Buckeye State, by a margin of 52 percent to 38 percent. [...]

GOP officials in Ohio, Florida and Indiana –- in addition to Michigan, where the Obama campaign sued -– have acknowledged plans to challenge voters on Election Day based on foreclosure lists.
According to local media in counties in each of these states — in Columbus, Ohio, Marion County, Ind., and Volusia County, Fla. — GOP operatives [...]

LONDONDERRY, N.H. — The Obama campaign has been tamping down post-debate exuberance all day today, and I just heard the candidate urge 4,000 supporters in New Hampshire to take nothing for granted.  But somebody still has to plan the victory party.

Yesterday, the full Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals handed a surprising victory to state Republicans by requiring Ohio election officials to check all new voters’ registration information against existing databases by Friday.
As the Associated Press reports, the court, sitting en banc (all 16 judges), reversed the ruling just last week of its own three-judge panel [...]