Month: November 2012

Disenfranchisement is a feature not a bug

by digby

Courtesy Right Wing Watch, here’s the godfather of the modern conservative movement spelling out the conservative position on the voting franchise:

“I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

That was 30 years ago. It was the Jesse Jackson Rainbow Coalition that gave them their biggest jolt and they have been institutionalizing vote suppression wherever possible ever since then. The very successful “vote fraud” myth was only made possible with the emergence of a full blown right wing mass media that could run parallel narratives without any overlap. The result is a vast number of people who can be lied to about easily disprovable facts without challenge.

For instance, Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller gathered a bunch of election predictions from their writers. Here’s an example of what they are saying:

I think Romney will take Ohio. The differential between his massive early- and absentee-vote advantage in 2008 and this year’s ground truth is already enough to wipe out his previous margin of victory in the Buckeye State. Colorado, Iowa and Nevada are probably lost causes for the GOP, but Pennsylvania will flip into the red column — partially because Hurricane Sandy will depress some turnout in Obama-friendly Philadelphia, and because the new Black Panthers have been warned this time.

I don’t know how many people believe that the Black Panthers kept decent white people from voting in Pennsylvania but the fact that it has persisted despite innumerable debunkings is a testament to how well this works.

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Tracking the disenfranchised in an election that’s “within the margin of litigation”

by digby

American Bridge has done some of the most aggressive trcking during this election season. And they are going to be just as aggressive on election day:

They spent the campaign season stalking Republican candidates and looking for YouTube-worthy gaffes. Now, a group of 19 trackers with a liberal super PAC will have a new target on Election Day: disenfranchised voters.

The trackers, who are affiliated with the American Bridge 21st Century super PAC, will be dispatched on Tuesday to key battleground states, including Colorado, Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin. Their plan is to document testimonials from voters who run into problems at the polls.

American Bridge put out a news release on Friday that said trackers will be looking for “unusually long lines, enforcement of non-existent voter ID requirements, excessive use of provisional ballots, limited accessibility to the polling location,” as well as false information form poll workers…

Harris said American Bridge trackers will be particularly interested in True the Vote, a Tea Party-affiliated organization that set a goal of training a million poll watchers this election cycle. He also said the trackers will be looking at poll monitors in Wisconsin who were reportedly encouraged to go incognito by the Romney campaign.

Regardless of how the election turns out tomorrow, our election system is in crisis and all of this needs to be documented.

It’s also worth pointing out that even some Republicans understand what a crock this voter fraud jihad is:

Since the race is “within the margin of litigation” Rich Hasen’s election law blog is the go-to site to track these issues. You might want to bookmark it in advance.

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QOTD: Peggy Noonan

by digby

Peggy’s feeling it:

While everyone is looking at the polls and the storm, Romney’s slipping into the presidency. He’s quietly rising, and he’s been rising for a while.

Oh boy:

It’s rising, it’s rising, virile, domineering, irresistible ….

Memorializing the rightwing election projections

by David Atkins

On the day before election day, it’s important to set down for the record in one place the electoral projections of the great rightwing pundits du jour for eternal memory. This should be done in the vain hope that the publications and media outlets that pay these people good money for their opinions may realize that their money is being wasted, and consider hiring people who actually live on Planet Reality instead. Of course, if the media functioned this way, it would have fired all the people who were wrong about the Iraq War, climate change, supply-side economics, austerity, and the rest. There is no accountability in the punditry business.

But just in case the accountability fairy shows up, it’s important to remember the following predictions:

First up, Karl Rove:

My prediction: Sometime after the cock crows on the morning of Nov. 7, Mitt Romney will be declared America’s 45th president. Let’s call it 51%-48%, with Mr. Romney carrying at least 279 Electoral College votes, probably more.

Next, Michael Barone:

Bottom line: Romney 315, Obama 223. That sounds high for Romney. But he could drop Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and still win the election. Fundamentals.

Then there’s Glenn Beck:

Story on the blaze on all those who are now saying what I have said for a while: landslide for Romney. 321 electoral votes.

George Will has 321 Romney, 217 Obama (though he forgot his own numbers on the air):

I forgot my exact number. I guess you have a graphic here. I guess the wild card in what I’ve projected is I’m projecting Minnesota to go for Romney. Now, that’s the only state in the union, because Mondale held it — native son Mondale held it when Romney was — when Reagan was getting 49 states — the only state that’s voted Democratic in nine consecutive elections. But this year, there’s a marriage amendment on the ballot that will bring out the evangelicals and I think could make the difference.

The immortally wrong Dick Morris:

We’re going to win by a landslide. “It will be the biggest surprise in recent American political history.” “It will rekindle the whole question on why the media played this race as a nailbiter where I think in fact Romney’s going to win by quite a bit. My own view is that Romney is going to carry 325 electoral votes…I think he’s going to win Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, Indiana…Iowa, Ohio, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Minnesota and Colorado. This is going to be a landslide.

Jay Cost of the Weekly Standard:

I think Mitt Romney is likely to win next Tuesday.

For two reasons:

(1) Romney leads among voters on trust to get the economy going again.

(2) Romney leads among independents.

There’s Mickey Kaus who, while stopping short of a prediction, is counting on the Bradley Effect and thinks Hurricane Sandy hurts Obama. If either or both of these were true, the election would go to Romney.

And now back to reality. Here’s a handy list of swing state polls, courtesy Steve Singiser at Daily Kos:

FLORIDA (Ipsos-Reuters): Obama 46, Romney 46 (LV); Obama 47, Romney 44 (RV)

FLORIDA (Mellman Group for Americans United For Change): Obama 47, Romney 45

FLORIDA (NBC News/Marist): Obama 49, Romney 47 (LV); Obama 49, Romney 46 (RV)

FLORIDA (Mason Dixon): Romney 51, Obama 45

FLORIDA (YouGov): Romney 48, Obama 47

IOWA (PPP): Obama 50, Romney 48

IOWA (YouGov): Obama 48, Romney 47

IOWA (Des Moines Register): Obama 47, Romney 42

IOWA (Grove Insight for Project New America/USAction): Obama 47, Romney 44

MICHIGAN (Foster McCollum White/Baydoun): Romney 47, Obama 46

MICHIGAN (PPP): Obama 52, Romney 46

MICHIGAN (YouGov): Obama 51, Romney 44

MINNESOTA (NMB Research–R): Romney 46, Obama 45

MINNESOTA (PPP): Obama 53, Romney 45

MINNESOTA (YouGov): Obama 50, Romney 43

NEVADA (YouGov): Obama 49, Romney 45

NEW HAMPSHIRE (PPP): Obama 50, Romney 48

NEW HAMPSHIRE (Univ. of New Hampshire): Obama 48, Romney 48

NEW HAMPSHIRE (YouGov): Obama 47, Romney 43

OHIO (Columbus Dispatch): Obama 50, Romney 48

OHIO (Grove Insight for Project New America/USAction): Obama 49, Romney 45

OHIO (Ipsos-Reuters): Obama 48, Romney 44 (LV); Obama 52, Romney 41 (RV)

OHIO (NBC News/Marist): Obama 51, Romney 45 (LV); Obama 51, Romney 44 (RV)

OHIO (PPP): Obama 52, Romney 47

OHIO (YouGov): Obama 49, Romney 46

PENNSYLVANIA (Muhlenberg College): Obama 49, Romney 46

PENNSYLVANIA (PPP): Obama 52, Romney 46

PENNSYLVANIA (Susquehanna Research–R): Obama 47, Romney 47

PENNSYLVANIA (YouGov): Obama 52, Romney 44

VIRGINIA (Ipsos-Reuters): Obama 47, Romney 46 (LV); Obama 50, Romney 42 (RV)

VIRGINIA (PPP): Obama 51, Romney 47

VIRGINIA (YouGov): Obama 48, Romney 46

WISCONSIN (Grove Insight for Project New America/USAction): Obama 48, Romney 42

WISCONSIN (PPP): Obama 51, Romney 48

WISCONSIN (YouGov): Obama 50, Romney 46

As Nate Silver suggests, either these polls are all wrong in the aggregate or these pseudo-pundits are nothing more than propagandists playing with Ouija boards.

My personal prediction? Obama 294, Romney 244. Obama wins national popular vote by 1.2 points. Though some intrepid electoral college work can doubtless figure out how I get to that prediction, I’ll post my state-by-state prediction at 3pm.

We’ll have to see who comes out correct in the end. My suspicion is that it’s not going to be the so-called conservatives who get paid big money for their supposed political wisdom.

Update: with bonus Peggy Noonan!

Nobody knows anything. Everyone’s guessing. I spent Sunday morning in Washington with journalists and political hands, one of whom said she feels it’s Obama, the rest of whom said they don’t know. I think it’s Romney. I think he’s stealing in “like a thief with good tools,” in Walker Percy’s old words. While everyone is looking at the polls and the storm, Romney’s slipping into the presidency. He’s quietly rising, and he’s been rising for a while…

mong the wisest words spoken this cycle were by John Dickerson of CBS News and Slate, who said, in a conversation the night before the last presidential debate, that he thought maybe the American people were quietly cooking something up, something we don’t know about.

I think they are and I think it’s this: a Romney win.

Just as fact-free as Noonan’s entire career, and every speech she’s ever written.

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GOP vote count strategery: Rules is rules

by digby

I certainly hope that the polling results in Ohio are correct and that President Obama has a nice cushion because if he doesn’t, and it comes down to that state, this is going to be a problem:

With just a few dozen hours left before polls open on Election Day, here is a candidate for the most important election-law story of the weekend — a story likely to cross over into the general political debate Sunday through Monday. This early copy from the Associated Press offered a hint:

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Voter advocates are criticizing an order by Ohio’s elections chief dealing with the casting of provisional ballots. Advocates are saying on Saturday that the order by Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted late Friday wrongly puts the burden of recording the form of ID used on a provisional ballot on voters, not pollworkers ….

Here’s what happened. On Thursday, voting-rights advocates filed an “emergency motion” with a federal trial judge seeking his reassurance that provisional ballots in Ohio will be judged by the standard he endorsed (and Ohio reportedly agreed to) in a recent consent decree. That standard, the plaintiffs say, is “that a provisional-ballot form that has incomplete or improperly completed information regarding the type of identification proffered by a voter should be counted pursuant” to Ohio law, which, they say, makes the poll worker responsible for taking down the information. Here’s a link to that motion.

Ohio has not yet responded to it with a filing in court — the state’s deadline is Monday. But it was a full day after this motion was filed that the secretary of state, at 6 p.m. on the Friday before the election, issued his contrary directive, the text of which you can read in this timely piece by Judd Legum. The issuance of the directive in turn prompted lawyers for the plaintiffs in the case to go back to U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley with an even more urgent request, filed late Friday evening:

This new Directive makes an affirmative change to the previous provisional ballot counting standard, beyond what was required to comply with this Court’s and the Sixth Circuit’s recent orders. Instead, contrary to this Court’s October 26, 2012 decision, the Secretary’s representations to this Court on October 24, 2012, and the Constitution, the Secretary is now ordering that county boards of election must reject provisional ballots when the identification information contained in Step 2 of the ballot affirmation form 12-B is incomplete.

The contours of the legal dispute aren’t narrowing, as some legal disputes do at this stage of an election contest, but instead are growing. They are growing because the secretary of state has just doubled down on his position about incomplete provisional ballots. If he was wrong on Thursday, you could say, he was even more wrong on Friday. And that will likely mean a Monday ruling* from Judge Marbley which will then be appealed into Tuesday (and beyond) to the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Folks, the legal fight for Ohio’s votes is already here and here to stay.

If you’re a worrywart like me, you’ll click over and read all the gory details.

Here’s the thing. The Republicans have already signaled their strategy:

THEODORE OLSON, 2000 BUSH CAMPAIGN LAWYER: I’m clearing my calendar just in case I need to be ready for the next five weeks.

JOHNS: He says if elections officials want to avoid litigation, they shouldn’t change direction in the middle of the game.

OLSON: If you follow the rules that were in place on Election Day with respect to counting the ballots, then the presumptive outcome will be respected when the Electoral College votes are counted.

Let’s hope Obama’s lead is too big for any of these shennanigans to be worthwhile.

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Anything to win: Pulling off America’s ugliest scab

by digby

Paul Ryan preaching to the faithful:

Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan told a group of Evangelical Christians Sunday that President Obama’s plans threaten “Judeo-Christian values” — a dramatic charge aimed at the Republican base, and delivered during a conference call that did not appear on his public schedule.

In his remarks to what organizers said were tens of thousands of members of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, Ryan said that President Barack Obama’s path for the next four years is a “dangerous” one.

“[It is] a path that compromises those values — those Judeo-Christian values that made us a great nation in the first place,” he said…

They “explained” afterwards that he was talking about religious liberty and Obamacare. Sure he was. I think one can be forgiven for suspecting that Ryan was actually playing to all the “Secret Muslim” paranoia that’s rampant among that crowd. But he is still the Villagers’ favorite wingnut wonk and I have no doubt that he’ll be welcomed back into the Very Serious People club if President Obama is re-elected. Lovely guy.

And yet,  as Adele Stan points out in this article, this Romney Ryan campaign has been the most racist campaign in recent memory:

Since the early months of 2011, our politics have been marinating in the language of racial hatred, whether in former U.S. senator Rick Santorum’s “ blah people ” moment, or former House speaker Newt Gingrich’s tarring of Barack Obama as “the food stamp president .”

Whether Obama wins or loses, new territory has been broken for the 21st century with the rhetoric of the Republican presidential campaign. Sure, it may seem like we’ve been here before, but the difference is that this time, it’s happening after we thought we had gotten past this level of racial hatred. But if Romney claims victory, having run on such a strategy, a new level of legitimacy will be conferred on the politics of race-baiting…

This isn’t just hyperbole:

A poll released last week by the Associated Press reveals an uptick since 2008 in the percentage of Americans who express negative attitudes towards blacks and Latinos. The poll measured both explicit expressions of racial prejudice and implicit attitudes.

On the explicit measure — prejudiced attitudes people were willing to express outright — the anti-black prejudice ticked up 3 points, from 47 percent in 2008 to 51 percent in 2012. But when one looks at the implicit attitudes the poll measured, the jump is more pronounced at 7 points. In 2008, the measure of implicit anti-black attitudes was 49 percent; in 2012 that number grew to 56 percent. Meanwhile, write the AP’s Sonya Ross and Jennifer Agiesta, “In both tests, the share of Americans expressing pro-black attitudes fell.”

Latinos fared just as poorly in the backlash. Ross and Agiesta explain:

Most Americans expressed anti-Hispanic sentiments, too. In an AP survey done in 2011, 52 percent of non-Hispanic whites expressed anti-Hispanic attitudes. That figure rose to 57 percent in the implicit test. The survey on Hispanics had no past data for comparison.

None of this is particularly surprising, given the season of scapegoating immigrants and black people the Republican right has fomented since the election of the nation’s first African-American president. I don’t pretend that these attitudes didn’t exist before 2008, nor do they exist only on the Republican side, as shown in the AP poll . But their expression was far less permissible.

What right-wing leaders saw in the election of President Barack Obama — a black man with an exotic name, a foreign father and a white mother — was a touchstone for rallying the resentment of the most fearful sectors of white society, places where people feel threatened by the changing shape of American culture. And so they did what the greediest fat-cats have always done: sought to pit the regular, non-rich people against each other, all in the service of preserving their own power.

It’s what the former slaveholders did in the South during reconstruction. It’s what the Romans did in their conquest of the world. It’s an oppressor’s game that America, having never come to terms with the deeper truths of slavery, is particularly susceptible to.

Last night on Fox I listened to half an hour of fearmongering that “the blacks” are threatening to riot if Obama doesn’t win. (This is, apparently, a common theme among the right wingers.)

It was very controversial to point any of this out during the last four years. People didn’t want to believe it in the glow of the great historical moment of 2008, which is understandable. But as much as America has always been an immigrant nation with great potential for upward mobility, this has been the other side of that coin. And you often see the tribal faultlines in political terms.

Yesterday there was a lot of righteous indignation, including by yours truly, about the Politico article that indicated the president’s majority wouldn’t translate into a mandate because it came from blacks, Hispanics, single women and white urban liberals. Without a majority of white conservatives, it just doesn’t count apparently.

Here is how the latest Pew poll breaks down the white vote in another way. It’s quite revealing:

Northeast: Obama 51 – Romney 41
Midwest: Obama 42 – Romney 51
West: Obama 45 – Romney 48
South: Obama 27 – Romney 66

It’s very likely that we’ll be looking at that famous 1860 map again on Wednesday.

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Your Election Night Party

by digby

That’s by Brian McFadden in case you’re wondering.

Pete Peterson’s poodle shows his belly

by digby

When the deficit fetishists at “Fix the debt” hit the ground running on Wednesday morning, they will try to tell you that they a non-partisan group of concerned citizens, particularly this fine fellow, who only has your best interest at heart:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Simpson and Bowles have been endorsing Republicans in some key House races as well. (And if you listen to “fix the debt” board member Ed Rendell on television, it’s clear he wouldn’t be unhappy with a Republican sweep as well — if only to finally purge the Democratic Party of its liberals.)This is not a non-partisan group by a long shot.

I don’t need to tell any of my readers that these people are not honest brokers. But I sure hope President Obama remembers who his friends were when the election was very close and he needed all the help he could get. Let’s just say it wasn’t Pete Peterson, David Walker and the rest of the deficit hawks. No matter how much he tries they will never give him their approval.

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The Handmaid’s Tale campaign

by digby

Via TPM:

Romney took flak from women’s groups, Democrats and Team Obama when he stood by Richard Mourdock in Indiana following that Senate nominee’s comments about rape, conception and God’s will. Now it seems he’s in the same boat again after cutting an ad for North Dakota Rep. Rick Berg (R), who as a state legislator voted for a bill that would have made getting an abortion a class AA felony, meaning rape and incest victims caught getting one would be subject to a sentence of life behind bars.

Berg’s 2007 vote in the state legislature for H.B. 1489 has been part of the national coverage of the North Dakota Senate race since September, when it popped up in the fallout after Rep. Todd Akin’s (R) “legitimate rape” comments in the Missouri Senate fight. But Romney’s decision to cut an ad for Berg that appeared on Saturday put the North Dakotan’s vote back in the national spotlight.

Can there be any dispute at this point that Republicans have determined that supporting forced childbirth for rape and incest is their best issue to Get out the Vote? Their people must really find this motivating for Romney to step in at this late date.

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Back to Ohio

by digby

By this point everyone should know about Ohio Secretary of State Jon “Katherine Harris” Husted. He’s gettin’ ‘er done. Here’s Ari Berman:

Once again Husted is playing the voter suppression card, this time at the eleventh hour, in a controversial new directive concerning provisional ballots. In an order to election officials on Friday night, Husted shifted the burden of correctly filling out a provisional ballot from the poll worker to the voter, specifically pertaining to the recording of a voter’s form of ID, which was previously the poll worker’s responsibility. Any provisional ballot with incorrect information will not be counted, Husted maintains. This seemingly innocuous change has the potential to impact the counting of thousands of votes in Ohio and could swing the election in this closely contested battleground…

In 2008, 40,000 of the 207,000 provisional ballots cast in Ohio were rejected. The majority of the state’s provisional ballots were cast in Ohio’s five largest counties, which are strongly Democratic. Moreover, provisional ballots are more likely to be cast by poorer and more transient residents of the state, who are also less likely to vote Republican.

The number of discarded provisional ballots could rise significantly due to Husted’s directive. It’s also very likely that more provisional ballots will be cast in 2012 than in 2008, thanks to a wave of new voting restrictions in Ohio and nationwide. The Associated Press reported that 31 percent of the 2.1 provisional ballots cast nationwide in 2008 were not counted, and called provisional ballots the “hanging chads of 2012.”

A series of missteps by the secretary of state and new rulings by the courts have increased the use of provisional ballots and could delay the outcome of the election and the legitimacy of the final vote.

Read on for the ugly details.

If this happens I’m fairly sure that everyone will just throw up their hands again and say “get over it” but at some point fixing our electoral system to prevent these shennanigans has to happen if the United States wants to continue to claim to be a democracy. When partisan election chiefs openly suppress the votes of their political rivals, you’ve crossed the line, even if the members of the jaded political establishment simply take a quick sniff of snuff, shake out their lace cuffs and declare the controversy dull and boring.

After the Ohio controversy of 2004 I wondered if Democrats were creating a legitimacy crisis by claiming that the voting machines had been hacked (among other things.) I was very short sighted and wrong. Even though I’ve been following this vote suppression campaign for a very long time, it never occurred to me that they would be able to institutionalize this “voter fraud” myth so quickly. They are very good at what they do.

Meanwhile, in Florida, early voting is in chaos. I think we all know about the possibility for a disputed election down there …

Update: Ah CNN, we can always count on you to claim that this is all silly partisan posturing, with the Tea Party backed “vote fraud” zealots True the Vote and Election Protection being two sides of the same coin:

JOE JOHNS, CNN CRIME AND JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Long lines in south Florida and in Cincinnati, Ohio, as early voting comes to a close, and those aren’t the only crowd this hotly contested election has attracted.

ERIC MARSHALL, ELECTION PROTECTION: Ten thousand grassroots and legal volunteers across the country in election country.

CHRISTIAN ADAMS, TRUE THE VOTE: Everywhere. They’re going to be everywhere. They’ve trained people in 50 states to legally poll watch.

JOHNS: Lawyer and poll watch of all political stripes descending on Ohio and across the country in search of any issues that need to be challenged.

MARSHALL: We’re looking for long lines that might be the result of machines breaking down, poll workers that might be asking the wrong question, asking for ID when they shouldn’t be.

JOHNS: Groups like the left leaning Election Protection have been training for weeks so they’re ready to respond to any problems at the polls in real time.

MARSHALL: With all the changes nationally in the voting laws, I think we’re prepared for there to be a significant amount of confusion on Election Day.

JOHNS: But controversy over how they do their job, poll watching has become part of the business.

(on camera): What do you think of the election protection people?

ADAMS [True the Vote]: Look, they have problems.

JOHNS (voice-over): Former Justice Department lawyer Christian Adams now represents True the Vote, a Tea Party-affiliated vote with a simple goal.

ADAMS: Free and fair elections. True the Vote stands with election integrity. Follow the law, period.

JOHNS: But True the Vote has real critics of their own from the left.

REP. ELIJAH CUMMINGS (D), MARYLAND: True to Vote has been stay it is likely challenged the voting rights of legitimate voters we must address anybody who tries to deny anybody that right to vote and I consider it criminal. I consider it unpatriotic and I think — and highly offensive.

JOHNS: A claim Adams does not take likely.

ADAMS: They’re liars. They’re bearing false witness against law-abiding citizens who are doing no more than observing the process, and they should be ashamed of themselves.

No, he is the liar. True the Vote is doing a whole lot more than “observing”. They are actively interfering. But don’t worry, they aren’t just ordinary citizens. Republicans have installed some of these lunatics in official positions in Ohio.

And then there’s this:

JOHNS: Whatever the election watchers find, it may ultimately be up to super lawyers like Ted Olson to determine whether to go to court. Olson, a Romney adviser, led Republicans to victory from a Supreme Court battle between George W. Bush and Al Gore in 2000.

THEODORE OLSON, 2000 BUSH CAMPAIGN LAWYER: I’m clearing my calendar just in case I need to be ready for the next five weeks.

JOHNS: He says if elections officials want to avoid litigation, they shouldn’t change direction in the middle of the game.

OLSON: If you follow the rules that were in place on Election Day with respect to counting the ballots, then the presumptive outcome will be respected when the Electoral College votes are counted.

JOHNS (on camera): But the truth is there could be other changes to the rules especially as states affected by the superstorm get ready for the election.

Notice the similar language of Adams the Tea Partier and Olson the top lawyer: “Follow the law, period.” No matter how trivial, no matter how many it disenfranchises, every tiny bureaucratic rule is sacred when it comes to counting the votes of Democrats. There will be no exceptions, even to allow citizens to cast their legal vote.

The good news is that Democrats are more prepared this time and have their people ready to go too. If there’s going to be a post election fight it won’t be as one-sided this time.

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