James Carville, the Democratic strategist and longtime Clinton supporter, today sent out a request for funds on behalf of Hillary Clinton for President. For a contribution of $5 or more, Carville writes that donors will be entered to win one of three fabulous prizes: A day with former President Bill Clinton, lunch and a tour of Washington with Carville and Paul Begala OR a trip to Los Angeles to attend the taping of the “American Idol” finale! (Wow, apparently being a member of the Obama administration does give you some connections in Hollywood.)

In December, after Clinton was nominated for secretary of state, the issue of how Clinton could legally raise funds to pay off her campaign debt arose because federal law barred Clinton from raising money once she became a member of the Obama administration. Massie Ritsch, communications director for the all-things-money-and-politics watchdog Center for Responsive Politics, said solicitations from the campaign are allowed as long as they do not come directly from Clinton — hence this one came from Carville.

Here’s the e-mail:

The judge also revealed that he had voted early on Friday and had to stand in line for more than two hours. “It was quite a civics lesson,” Williams said.

The Advancement Project, which joined in the lawsuit with the NAACP, issued a statement saying, “With 500,000 new voters and high expected turnout the burden shouldn’t be on voters, it should be on the Commonwealth to make sure voting is accessible.”

Obama GOTV literature today.

“I feel great and it was fun, I had a chance to vote with my daughters,” Obama told reporters later on the airport tarmac, “I feel really good.”

Another reporter asked if Obama felt “sentimental.”

“You know I’m sure I will tonight – that’s when polls close,” he said, just before the campaign plane departed for Indiana. “The journey ends but voting with my daughters, that was a big deal. I noticed that Michelle took a long time though. I had to check to see who she was voting for,” he added.

Obama voted at Beluah Shoesmith Elementary School. With more than 50 state and local judges on the ballot, the Democratic presidential nominee spent quite a bit of time at the booth. NBC’s “Today Show” carried a live feed of the long ordeal, and, at one point, an anchor felt compelled to tell viewers that voting did not usually take that long, so people should not be dissuaded from turning out today. A pool report detailed the family scene:

Michelle, Sasha and Malia accompanied [Obama]. Malia went into the polling booth with Michelle and Sasah hung out in her own polling booth looking very grown up. She then looked on as Obama cast his ballot. Later, she hugged Obama’s leg looking impatient… Michelle took longer than Obama to finish her ballot. She did not look up from the ballot at all, while Obama grinned occassionally at his daughters.

With seamless timing, the Obama campaign had Sen. Joe Biden cued up to vote for the cameras as soon as Obama left the booth.

Meanwhile, it seems there will be no footage of President George W. Bush voting today. Both nominees ended up running against the incumbent. Bush already voted by mail to avoid being seen today — and maybe further damaging the possibilities of Sen. John McCain.

Sen. George McGovern with "Vote McGovern"

From The Los Angeles Times:

With the title scrawled like graffiti beneath an official campaign photograph not of McGovern but of his opponent, Richard M. Nixon, Warhol incisively pictured a cliché: Consider the alternative.

That camp dexterity with clichés is what made Warhol a big success in the 1950s advertising industry, and it’s also the key to understanding Pop Art. But there’s more. Color is wickedly deployed.

Against a flaming orange background and above a hot pink suit, Nixon’s face shades from sickly green into bilious blue. The hot and cold complementary colors vivify the image, which accomplishes the reverse of what Warhol had done to Marilyn Monroe. Intimately familiar with Catholic icons since childhood, he had made Marilyn’s publicity photograph into an idealized depiction of the queen of heaven, just days after her tragic death. Nixon, on the other hand, got the Satan treatment, like something from the hellish underworld of Hieronymus Bosch.

Of course, political posters can only do so much. McGovern lost the 1972 election in the second largest landslide in American history. At that point, the previous June’s Watergate burglary was just a brief newspaper item. Two years later Satan–er, I mean, Nixon resigned the presidency in disgrace.

With the records still unreleased this week, and no indication from the McCain campaign that they would be forthcoming, several media outlets began to wonder aloud if the campaign would make good on this promise.

The campaign finally released a letter (PDF) from Palin’s physician, Cathy Baldwin-Johnson, late last night briefly summarizing the GOP vice presidential nominee’s medical history.

There’s not much to report. According to the letter, Palin “is in excellent health and has no known health problems that would interfere with her ability to carry out the duties and obligations of the Vice President of the United States of America.”

Baldwin-Johnson reports that Palin has no major medical problems, takes no medications and has been hospitalized recently only for childbirth.

While the letter is certainly not the detailed medical history that Palin said she would release, it does appear to indicate that, should Sen. John McCain win the election, she would be physically capable of assuming the presidency if needed.

However, the release of the letter by the McCain campaign late on the eve of Election Day did not allow voters much of an opportunity to evaluate the information before casting their votes. But considering that McCain — a 72-year-old four-time cancer survivor — allowed a few reporters only three hours to review his records without allowing photocopies, Palin’s release is probably what we should have expected.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow is rightly calling it a “poll tax” — the hours-long lines that many people will have to endure to exercise the most basic of American rights. It’s a right that many Americans — who have full-time jobs, child care and other responsibilities — simply can’t afford.

In Virginia, the NAACP tried suing over it, charging that the state is clearly unable to handle the predicted historic voter turnout on Tuesday — and lost. On Monday, a federal judge refused to order any changes.

In Pennsylvania, officials have said they fear an electoral flood — with not nearly enough voting machines to handle the expected before- and after-work crowds.

To Ed Foley, an election law expert at Ohio State University, “the most worrisome threat on the horizon from a national perspective is the potential that states won’t be able to handle the volume of voters on Tuesday.”

This is all aside from the various criminally fraudulent tactics that have tried to keep people away from the polls: by threatening their arrest; telling them to vote on the wrong day. or even, via robocall, offering voters to vote by phone.

When the most historic presidential election in decades could be decided based not on voter preferences but on a combination of who’s least duped or intimidated, whose names are least subject to typos in bureaucratic databases and who can afford to wait longest on line, that’s a real problem.

All these claims of voter fraud, vote suppression and registration shenanigans may have the unfortunate effect of casting doubt on the legitimacy of the next president.

The one good thing that could come out of this glaring spotlight on the absurd mechanics of voting in this country could be, finally, a real push for future voting reform.

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. Channeling their inner-Obama, perhaps.

Anyway, given the big day ahead, the campaign was not offering any interviews and my visit was off the record. The campaign’s public outreach, however, shows that the staff was getting plenty done. Near midnight on election eve, the campaign uploaded this final GOTV message on YouTube, “The American People are the Answer”:

Flickr: nshepard

As Republican charges of “fraud” and Democratic claims of “voter suppression” have escalated in the home stretch of the presidential election campaign, liberal activists have started blasting Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential team’s “voter protection” effort for not doing enough to ensure that all Democratic votes are going to be counted on Election Day.

Many activists say that voting machines have been demonstrated as vulnerable to tampering, and when there is no paper trail of the votes cast, problems are possible. These advocates are worried that Obama’s campaign is not doing enough to make sure that the electronic voting machines are properly calibrated — so that a vote cast for Obama goes to Obama.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

They are also concerned that the Obama campaign’s legal effort has been not been aggressive enough. They point to Pennsylvania, where the NAACP sued to force the Democratic-controlled state government to provide paper ballots where electronic voting machines have failed. The NAACP won the suit — but the Obama campaign never joined in.

Liberal bloggers talk about how Obama could do more to publicize voting problems — like technical glitches in voting machines and GOP efforts to hold down turnout — in the same way it has countered Republican-generated smears and robocalls.

“I remain not just exceedingly skeptical,” the voter protection blogger Brad Friedman wrote in his blog, Bradblog, last week, “but downright furious at the party’s brazen willingness to allow millions of votes to go either uncounted, incorrectly recorded or recorded in such a way that is 100 percent unverifiable by any human being,”

“They need to get over their tortured thinking that discussing these issues somehow depresses turnout,” Friedman wrote in an email, “There is zero evidence for that thinking.”

Obama’s chief election law attorney, Bob Bauer, disagrees with that argument. Bauer says that evidence from the 2004 election demonstrates that highlighting problems with voting machinery and voter suppression turns off Democratic voters.

“It’s never helpful if the environment is filled with hyperbole about false claims.” Bauer said in a phone interview Thursday, “Voters don’t want to hear it. We’re not going to fall for [the Republicans’] public-relations bait. But if they take a concrete action we will respond to it.”

Bauer maintains that the Obama campaign has moved quickly to respond to technical problems with voting equipment and quell any efforts to deceive voters.

For example, in northern Nevada, Bauer said, many Latino voters had received calls telling them that they could vote by phone. The Obama campaign responded to set the record straight.

When voting machines used in early voting started flipping Obama votes to McCain recently, lawyers from the campaign’s Machine Task Force were dispatched to West Virginia to make sure the machines were properly calibrated.

The Obama campaign, however, has not held a single pres0s conference to highlight these issues.

Bauer and other lawyers close to the campaign, however, said that the campaign’s voter protection effort is more aggressive, more robust and started earlier than that of the Kerry campaign four years ago.

The Obama team has more than 100 paid staffers and full-time volunteers working on voter protection, according to a memorandum sent last week to members of Congress from the Democratic National Committee’s staff attorney, Justin Levitt.

In addition, since the Obama campaign asserts that voter protection is as much a public-relations battle as a legal one, Bauer and the DNC outside counsel, Joseph Sandler, have hired Jenny Backus, a Democratic strategist, as a spokeswoman.

“[Sen. John] Kerry had amassed a pretty large operation himself in terms of having lawyers out there ready to pounce,” said Kenneth Gross, a campaign finance and election law attorney at Skadden, Arps. “Whatever Kerry had, is that much more sophisticated and that much more vibrant…. They are poised to bring action if there are irregularities on Election Day.”

Like Kerry four years ago, the Obama campaign hired a “voter protection coordinator.” This staffer, usually a lawyer, works with field organizers to help register and educate voters, consults with local and state officials to identify potential problems and implements a lawyer recruitment program to get volunteers out to the polls on Election Day.

In Michigan, the campaign and the state party share the same attorney, Mary Ellen Gurewitz, an election law specialist with the Detroit firm of Sachs Waldman. Renee Paradis, a former attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice, is the campaign’s voter-protection coordinator.

Obama’s attorneys, in Michigan and elsewhere, say that more votes are lost to incompetence than fraud or suppression. But they are, nonetheless, trying to keep tabs on proactive suppression efforts.

Friedman, the blogger, disputes this. He says that one serious issue is with electronic voting machines that are prone to error, because there is no way to know whether a vote has been lost.

“They are making no effort to remove these machines,” Friedman said. “It’s exceedingly troubling.”

Ultimately, it won’t be clear whether the Obama campaign’s legal effort has been a success until Nov. 5. But Edward Foley, a law professor at the Mortiz College of Law at Ohio State University, remains concerned that in some states, like Pennsylvania, the lack of a paper trail could undermine the outcome of the election.

Lawyers in Michigan said they have identified trouble spots from previous elections. They say they have made sure that precincts are prepared to handle what is expected to be record turnout.

Efforts to make Election Day go more smoothly are expected to include: handing out sample ballots, dividing long lines alphabetically, posting easy-to-read signs and monitoring to ensure that voters are standing in the right place if a polling station includes more than one precinct.

In New Mexico, Ann Marie Puente, an official with the Travis County Democratic Party in Texas, is the Obama campaign’s voter protection coordinator. She has one deputy. Neither are lawyers but they are building a network of more than 600 out-of-state lawyers to help on Election Day.

In Colorado, the Obama campaign has set up a similar structure with Tim Karpoff, a lawyer from the University of Chicago who worked for Kerry in 2004, heading up the voter protection effort in Wisconsin.

In October, Obama campaign aides sent an email out, seeking volunteers for Spanish-speaking poll workers and watchers. As of Oct. 22, only a small portion of Denver’s polling stations had the requisite number of Spanish-speaking staffers as required by state law.

The campaign also asked for volunteers to head to various counties around the state with sizable Spanish-speaking communities.

As for litigation, Bauer has settled on a strategy of surgical legal strikes, while relying on liberal advocacy and civil-rights groups to stop any efforts to disenfranchise eligible voters.

Though not a hard and fast rule, Democrats expect to take legal action in states where Republicans control the election and voting processes; while Republicans expect to do the opposite.

“If your party is in control in that battleground state, the national campaign will leave it to the local officials,” Gross said. “If your person is not in power they start to get very anxious and paranoid.”

Bauer has won a suit in Michigan and in Montana last month. In Michigan, Republicans promised not to specifically challenge voters whose homes had been foreclosed. In Montana, a judge blocked the Montana’s Republican Party’s effort to declare thousands of voters ineligible.

In Ohio, the Supreme Court ruled that citizens could register to vote and cast a ballot on the same day during the state’s early voting period. In Indiana, state Republicans failed to centralize early voting sites in a government building; state courts ruled that satellite centers for early voting will remain open.

The NAACP won its lawsuit in Pennsylvania and in Colorado, advocacy groups won a commitment from the Republican secretary of state not to purge voters from registration rolls. In New Mexico, the ACLU and Mexican American Legal Defense Fund have filed separate lawsuits alleging GOP-sponsored voter intimidation and suppression. They have not been resolved.

For a list of pending lawsuits across the country, go here.

“No question that the Republicans have put [up] a good bit of activity and tried at a very high level to run a challenge program at a very high level. If you take a look at [their] record of success, it is dismal,” Bauer said. “They have lost in every state where we have engaged with them.”

Friedman says the Obama campaign still needs to be more aggressive.

“They need to bring lawsuits loudly and immediately, dozens of them, wherever necessary,” he wrote in an email.

Bauer says he has made a conscious effort to fight the legal battles on his terms rather than McCain’s. He held several conference calls with reporters after Republicans accused the Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, and the Obama campaign of working together to register fraudulent voters.

But rather than engaging McCain’s “Honest and Open Election Committee,” led by former GOP Sens. John Danforth (Mo.) and Warren Rudman (N.H.), Bauer turned the tables on McCain’s campaign by calling on the U.S. attorney general to investigate links between McCain’s campaign and federal law enforcement officials.

In a letter sent to Atty. Gen. Michael Mukasey on Oct. 20, Bauer asked that DOJ’s special prosecutor investigate “an emerging pattern of apparent unlawful coordination” between the McCain campaign, DOJ and Republican officials at the state level.

Four days later, Bauer sent Mukasey a letter asking him not to follow up on a White House request to intervene in Ohio and elsewhere to set up a system to challenge voters’ eligibility. Mukasey subsequently said he would not intervene.

In focusing on Mukasey, Bauer tied GOP efforts at encouraging state and federal officials to investigate voter registration fraud back to the Bush administration’s firing of eight U.S. attorneys for political reasons, including their unwillingness to pursue voter fraud cases. A special prosecutor is examining whether DOJ officials violated federal criminal law.

“John McCain just doesn’t get it,” read Obama’s prepared remarks. “Remember what he said when he was here on Sept. 15? That day, more than 5,000 jobs were lost and [...] former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan said we were in a ‘once in a century’ crisis. And yet, despite our economic crisis, John McCain actually came here, to Veterans’ Memorial Arena, and repeated something he’s said at least 16 times on this campaign. He said – and I quote – ‘the fundamentals of our economy are strong.’”

Obama is planning to blast that claim, which his senior strategists believe marked a turning point in the campaign. “That’s not only fundamentally wrong, it also sums up his out-of-touch, on-your-own economic philosophy,” his preview text reads. “It’s a philosophy that says we should give a $700,000 tax cut to the average Fortune 500 CEO and $300 billion to the same Wall Street banks that got us into this mess. It’s a philosophy that says we shouldn’t give a penny of relief to more than 100 million middle-class Americans. And it’s a philosophy that will end when I am president of the United States of America!”

Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, was recently asked by Time what the “defining moment” was on the campaign, “the moment when you thought Obama could win?” Axelrod’s mind went to Jacksonville.

“In a weird way, that Monday, whatever it was, Sept. 15, when the financial crisis really erupted and Sen. McCain said that the fundamentals of the economy were strong, that was a pretty decisive moment in this campaign,” said Axelord. “I think that kicked off a couple of weeks where you saw a real strong contrast between these two candidates and I think redounded to our efforts culminating in the debates.”

It looks like Axelrod’s fingerprints are on this final salvo, which the campaign released at 10:06 Monday morning. At this frantic closing period of the campaign, of course, it’s rare for anything that the candidates’ say in speeches to break through.

In Florida, however, where McCain is also campaigning today, the attack may carry extra salience — with local history that McCain would rather forget.

While Sen. John McCain maintained a leisurely schedule for much of the campaign — until recently, McCain rarely did more than two public events in one day — he and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin are expected to take part in a combined 13 rallies in 11 states today.

McCain is scheduled to attend seven rallies — mostly at airports, where he can leave quickly for his next stop — in six states: Florida, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Indiana, New Mexico, Nevada, winding up with a midnight rally in his home state of Arizona.

You may be surprised by the inclusion of Tennessee. McCain will host a rally at an airport in Blountville, Tenn., in the far northeastern tip of the state. Blountville is a short, 14-mile trip from Bristol, Va., and, according to the McCain campaign Website, tickets are being distributed at several Virginia GOP offices. McCain may be hoping his appearance will also resonate in nearby rural, northwestern North Carolina — another hotly contested battleground state.

Palin, for her part, is slated to make six appearances in five states, including: Ohio, Missouri, Iowa, Colorado and Nevada.

The campaigning doesn’t end tonight — McCain has a rally scheduled for noon tomorrow in the Republican stronghold of Colorado Springs Grand Junction, Colo.

The list of states that the Republican candidates are visiting today says a lot about the state of the campaign. President George W. Bush carried all but one — Pennsylvania — in 2004. According to RealClearPolitics, Sen. Barack Obama leads McCain in the polls in all these states except Missouri, Indiana and Arizona (and Tennessee); Obama and McCain are tied in North Carolina.

At this late hour, with McCain trailing in so many battleground states, this last-ditch campaign-a-thon represents, literally, his final opportunity to turn the tide. Politico reports that the McCain campaign is banking on those voters who say they still remain undecided to break for McCain and tilt the election.

One has to imagine that, in addition to the undecideds, McCain is praying for a miracle.