Let's keep marching until every American has the opportunity to realize their dreams. #MLKDream50, pic.twitter.com/TolR18Z7qG
— The White House (@whitehouse) August 29, 2013
"On this Women’s Equality Day, we honor those who fought tirelessly for a woman’s right to vote." http://t.co/meP9ZJ2Hoz #WomenVote
— The White House (@whitehouse) August 26, 2013
^@LeftOutLoud: Happy Women's Equality Day! 93 years ago, 19th Amendment was ratified, giving women the right to vote. pic.twitter.com/bn9Mknifoi
— Nora Wahlquist (@DahmPublishing) August 27, 2013
It's Women's Equality Day. Here's to the progress we've made…and the long, LONG way we've got to go. pic.twitter.com/kXvTRLpcJN
— Upworthy (@Upworthy) August 26, 2013
Happy Women's Equality Day! On 1/1, being a woman is no longer a preexisting condition, thx to #ACA #GetCovered pic.twitter.com/gF6ieAJ5ry
— Get Covered America (@GetCoveredUS) August 26, 2013
An emotional President Obama at Iowa rally. twitter.com/niccolina/stat…
— Nikki Kahn (@niccolina) November 6, 2012
Sign handed out at final #Obama rally in #Iowa twitter.com/LukeRussert/st…
— Luke Russert (@LukeRussert) November 6, 2012
Obama becoming a heavier favorite, in 538's view. Now 86% to win Electoral College. fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com
— Nate Silver (@fivethirtyeight) November 5, 2012
Obama unlikely to win by anything like his post-DNC margins. But Romney has no momentum, Obama's state polling is robust, and time is up.
— Nate Silver (@fivethirtyeight) November 5, 2012
Headline from 10/29/84: "Mondale upset win predicted": news.google.com/newspapers?id=…
— Nate Silver (@fivethirtyeight) November 5, 2012
Final Pew Poll: Obama 49 Mitt 42 registered voters. Obama 48 Mitt 45 Likely voters. #p2
— Steve Weinstein (@steveweinstein) November 4, 2012
Pew Poll: Who do you expect to win? Obama 52 Mitt 30. This question is always a strong predictor.
— Steve Weinstein (@steveweinstein) November 4, 2012
Final Pew poll of campaign shows Obama regained much of the ground he lost following the 1st presidential debate pewrsr.ch/Tsny9I
— Pew Research Center (@pewresearch) November 4, 2012
Saturday was the last day for early voting in Florida, where polls showed Democratic President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney running neck-and-neck.
But Orange County Elections Supervisor Bill Cowles reopened the polls at one site, a library in the Orlando suburb of Winter Park, from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Sunday.
The library was evacuated and voting there was suspended for four hours on Saturday because suspicious items were found on the grounds. A bomb squad safely detonated both - a cooler containing small electronics and what investigators described as a bag of miscellaneous garbage.
. . . In Miami, the Florida Democratic Party filed suit in U.S. District Court on Sunday asking for an extension of early voting opportunities in densely populated Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties, where some voters waited six and seven hours to cast ballots on Saturday.
The lawsuit said the lines in the Democratic-leaning region were longer than in other areas, deterring or preventing people from voting.
. . . Election supervisors' offices were also opened in several other densely populated counties on Sunday for in-person absentee balloting.
Republican Governor Rick Scott refused on Thursday to extend early voting statewide despite the long lines.
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UPDATE 2:50 p.m.: The Miami-Dade Elections office is facing a backlash Sunday evening after the lone voting location was quickly overrun by would-be voters, and because the location is far from neighborhoods where Democrats are most likely to live. From the Miami Herald:
The department had opened its Doral headquarters from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. as a work-around to an early-voting crackdown law.Karen Andre, who heads the Florida office for Obama’s Organizing for America field campaign, called the situation “unacceptable,” and said the organization’s attorneys would be “monitoring the situation.”
But by 2 p.m., around 180 voters had showed up, and department spokeswoman Christina White said the office would not be able to accommodate any more voters who showed up. Additional voters would be turned away, she said.
“We had the best of intentions to provide this service today,” she said. “We just can’t accommodate it to the degree that we would like to.”
Shortly after, however, the department locked its doors and shut down the operation without explanation. The people in line did not get to vote.
“Let us vote!” they shouted.
The department had only one ballot-printing machine, five voting booths and two staffers to assist voters Sunday.
DIRECTIVE 2012-50
October 16, 2012
To: All County Boards of Elections
Directors, Deputy Directors, and Board Members
Re: Uniform Days and Hours for In-Person Absentee Voting from November 3, 2012 through November 5, 2012
I hereby set uniform days and hours for in-person absentee voting, for UOCAVA and non-UOCAVA voters alike, as follows:
Saturday, November 3, 2012 – 8:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.
Sunday, November 4, 2012 – 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Monday, November 5, 2012 – 8:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.
This Directive expands the uniform days and hours for in-person absentee voting established by Directive 2012-35, which remains in effect. As such, Boards are reminded that any voter in line when that day’s hours for in-person absentee voting ends, may remain in line to apply for and receive an absentee ballot in person.
If you have any questions regarding this Directive, please contact the Secretary of State’s elections attorney assigned to your county by calling (614) 466-2585.
Sincerely,
Jon
Without noted dissent, the Supreme Court at midday Tuesday turned aside a plea by state officials in Ohio to allow them to close down voting opportunities on the final three days before election day on November 6. The ruling was a significant victory for President Obama and for Democrats, especially since they claimed that the shuttering of voting offices on the Saturday, Sunday, and Monday before election day would be likely to affect low-income and minority voters — many of whom may be expected to vote Democratic.
The Court acted in a one-sentence order that contained no explanation. The action, though, left intact a lower-court order that required voting officials in the crucial electoral state to open the polls on that final weekend to all voters, if they open them to any voters. Ohio officials wanted to allow voting then only by members of the military and their families, on the theory that they might be called away suddenly on military duty. While it is up to each county’s election officials to decide whether to be open for voting on those days, many if not most — and, crucially, major cities — are expected to do so rather than shut out military voters altogether. Under the lower-court order, all voters must be treated the same for early voting.
COLUMBUS – Secretary of State Jon Husted today announced that he will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to make the final determination on whether the General Assembly of the State of Ohio or the federal courts should set Ohio election laws. Husted will be appealing the Friday decision by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Obama v. Husted. Regarding this decision, all of the following may be attributed to Secretary Husted:
“This is an unprecedented intrusion by the federal courts into how states run elections and because of its impact on all 50 states as to who and how elections will be run in America we are asking the Supreme Court to step in and allow Ohioans to run Ohio elections.
“This ruling not only doesn’t make legal sense, it doesn’t make practical sense. The court is saying that all voters must be treated the same way under Ohio law, but also grants Ohio’s 88 elections boards the authority to establish 88 different sets of rules. That means that one county may close down voting for the final weekend while a neighboring county may remain open. How any court could consider this a remedy to an equal protection problem is stunning.
Tuesday's decision is a sharp contrast to Simpson's ruling in August when he refused to issue an injunction and upheld the law. In that opinion, Simpson said the law "is a reasonable, non-discriminatory, non-severe burden when viewed in the broader context of the widespread use of photo ID in daily life."
He also said that opponents of the voter ID law "did an excellent job of 'putting a face' to those burdened by this new requirement," but he did not "have the luxury of deciding this issue based on my sympathy for the witnesses."
Opponents appealed his decision to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. After hearing arguments from both sides, the Supreme Court returned the case to Simpson and ordered him to "reassess" his ruling based on the availability of ID cards and in light of "expedited" efforts put forth by the Pennsylvania government.
Simpson's decision may not be the final word on this case. It can be appealed back to the state Supreme Court, which is next scheduled to meet Oct. 15 in Pittsburgh.
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You know, the election has already started. In almost half the states in the country, people can already get access to a ballot and start voting by mail, if they want to. You can already do in-person early voting in Idaho, South Dakota, and in Vermont. Early in-person voting also starts on Thursday of this week in Wyoming and in Iowa.
And what that means beyond just the convenience of voting in those states where you can vote early, what that means for this campaign,
is that every day is potentially decisive now.
...With Early Voting every day is election day now.
In both Florida and Virginia, Obama is ahead of Romney by five points among likely voters (including those leaning toward a particular candidate), 49 percent to 44 percent.
In Ohio, the president’s lead is seven points, 50 percent to 43 percent.
Among a larger pool of registered voters, Obama’s advantage over Romney slightly increases to 7 points in Virginia, 8 in Florida and 9 in Ohio.
. . . Romney likely needs to capture at least two of these states, if not all three, to secure the 270 electoral votes necessary to win the presidency.
By comparison, Obama can reach 270 by winning just one or two of these battlegrounds – on top of the other states already considered to be in his column.
(Obama also has an additional path to victory without any of these three states if he wins the toss-up contests of Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin.)
PPP's newest Virginia poll finds Barack Obama leading by 5 points, 51-46. Obama's lead is unchanged from a month ago when we found him leading 50-45 in the state. He may not be seeing a bump from the convention in the state at this point, but he was in a pretty good position to begin with.
Virginia continues to look like it may be something of a firewall state for Obama. PPP has now polled it 9 times this cycle, and President Obama has led by at least 4 points on all 9 of the polls. He's been ahead by 5 points, 5 points, 8 points, and 8 points over the course of the four surveys we've conducted in 2012.
I’ve been watching elections professionally for going on two decades.
From a fair amount of experience I’ll say one thing: if your theory is based on some sort of systematic error on the part of most pollsters, you’re almost certainly in for a really long election night.
Each day that Mr. Romney fails to make gains in the polls will count as an opportunity lost for him. And with each passing day, the model will become slightly more confident that a small lead in the polls will translate into an Electoral College victory for Mr. Obama, since the error in the polls becomes smaller as we get closer to Nov. 6.
It’s also worth tracking the number of undecided voters remaining in the race. The model assumes that overall uncertainty in the forecast is a function of the number of undecideds, in addition to the time left until Election Day.
. . . The average bookmaker now makes Mr. Obama about a 75 percent favorite to win re-election, almost exactly as the FiveThirtyEight forecast now does.
. . . conservatives are talking themselves into optimism. “Before you decide the election is over based on September polls,” writes Mike Huckabee in an email to supporters, “remember that coming out of the 1988 Democratic convention, Gallup showed an insurmountable 17-point lead for that great former president, Michael Dukakis.”
Walking around the conference, I heard the Tale of Dukakis again and again. But the story leaves out how George H.W. Bush’s convention came after Dukakis, and he made the most of the opportunity to erase that lead. Like every “maybe this time will be like that time” analysis, it leaves out the demographic and culture shifts that have made it easier for a Democrat to put together 270 electoral votes.
I would urge some caution if you come across analyses that take the form: “No candidate has won when trailing in the polls by X amount as of Y date, subject to conditions P and Q”.
These analyses may convey something of the right spirit, in that they emphasize that the polls have a history of being pretty accurate after Labor Day and the conventions. But they do it with much more specificity than is warranted. There is no magic date when polls go from being inaccurate to accurate, and no exact threshold at which a lead in the polls goes from being surmountable to insurmountable.
Rather, it all exists along a probabilistic spectrum, with a candidate’s chance of winning primarily a function of the size of his lead, the time remaining until Election Day and the number of undecideds left in the electorate.
“We really appreciate you coming here,” Jindal said.
“I appreciate the chance to be here,” Romney replied. “I have a lot of questions for you.” The two discussed evacuation procedures and the contributions of the Red Cross, Salvation Army and other organizations.
“Did the water come from the sky, or the rivers, or the ocean?” Romney asked. Jindal’s response was not audible to reporters.
There, with the world's media looking on, he met 22-year-old mother-of-two Ashley Vegas, whose home was destroyed by a 12-foot (four-meter) wall of water, and whose bare feet contrasted oddly with Romney's suede loafers.
His advice for the suddenly homeless family? Seek a bailout from the US federal government's disaster agency FEMA by calling its 211 emergency hotline.
Vegas was thankful for the lifeline, open to many in Louisiana since Romney's opponent President Barack Obama declared a federal emergency there earlier this week, freeing up government rescue funds for beleaguered communities.
"I think he's a very good man," Vegas volunteered. "He's here to help everybody and do what he can."
When faced with one of the victims of the flood, however, Romney came up well short in the empathy department. From The Associated Press:
Romney and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) spent close to an hour meeting with first responders and local officials. Romney shook hands with National Guardsmen outside the U.S. Post Office and talked with a local resident, Jodie Chiarello, 42, who lost her home in Isaac’s flooding.
“He just told me to, um, there’s assistance out there,” Chiarello said of her conversation with Romney. “He said, go home and call 211.” That’s a public service number offered in many states.
Chiarello said she will likely seek some other shelter because her home was submerged in the flooding.
In Romney’s defense, at least he didn’t offer her a quarter for the payphone.
For a candidate whom voters already don’t think understands their struggles, who is on an already cynical-looking tour of a disaster area, and whose party has a famously bad record of helping people during natural disasters, this is not a great headline. You could say, in fairness to Romney, that at least he was trying to help, but when someone tells you their house just got submerged in a flood, telling them to go home isn’t actually all that helpful.
Judge Economus and his father, who immigrated to America in 1916, were featured in a segment of "Gasoline Alley," a nationally syndicated comic strip. The theme of the comic emphasized the spirit of America and the naturalization process that we all hold dear. Judge Economus and his wife, Marie, have three daughters and three granddaughters.
Ohio, a prized swing state in the November6 presidential election between Obama and Republican Mitt Romney, allows voting in person to begin on October 2. But the state cut off early balloting on the Friday before Election Day, except for members of the military, saying that would prevent fraud and give election boards time to prepare for voting.
In granting a preliminary injunction, U.S. District Judge Peter Economus wrote that lawyers for Ohio's Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted failed to "articulate a precise compelling interest" in establishing a Friday deadline for non-military voters.
"On balance, the right of Ohio voters to vote in person during the last three days prior to Election Day -- a right previously conferred to all voters by the state -- outweighs the state's interest in setting a 6 p.m. deadline," Economus wrote.
Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine said in a statement that he would appeal the ruling.
— A new federal court ruling preventing the state from enforcing a law that disqualifies provisional ballots, the ballots of last resort, when a voter shows up at the right multi-precinct polling place but casts his vote at the wrong precinct table due to poll worker error. Mr. Husted is expected to appeal the decision.
—A pending decision in a lawsuit filed by President Obama’s re-election campaign seeking to reopen the final days before the election to early in-person voting by all voters, not just military members and their families. That three-day window was closed under a law passed last year.
—A lawsuit filed last week by backers of a voter referendum on a GOP-enacted state elections law overhaul that Republicans have since repealed. The suit seeks to force the referendum on the Nov. 6 ballot and to kill Mr. Husted’s early voting directive in the meantime as an illegal reenactment of a portion of that now defunct law.
— The promise of a new lawsuit by a group calling itself Judicial Watch to force Mr. Husted to purge voter registration rolls to reflect what it characterizes as discrepancies with U.S. Postal Service records. It has already filed similar suits in other states.
"This is nothing more than uniform voter suppression, make no mistake about it. Ohio and four other states, Ed, have extremely cut early voting hours. And get this - in Ohio and Florida, they cut Sundays. We know exactly who their targets are. And again, in Cuyahoga County, African Americans make up 26% of the registered voters. But during 2008, early in-person voting, they made up 56% of the vote."
"How dare we forget how we got over in this country. How African Americans had to dodge the barks and bites of dogs, how they had to leap over grandfather clauses, and literacy tests, and poll taxes. And here we are in the 21st century with the elections officer who is supposed to adhere morally and legally to expanding the vote, but here he is suppressing the vote."
"And I'm going to tell you something, Ed, if you are poor, working class, middle class, elderly, African American, Hispanic, or a woman, you are SOL (sh** out of luck) when it comes to Republicans. They are making it very clear that they don't care - they are here to oppress, suppress, and they don't care how they steal the vote."
. . . [Governor Kasich] is MIA (missing-in-action) when it comes to this voting issue, and it's a shame.
. . . "If you extrapolate out the date from 2008, with the hours that have been eliminated unilaterally by the Sec. of State, about 200,000 Ohioans will be impacted by that. And if we remember, Governor Kasich beat Governor Strickland by about a 2% margin. Every vote counts and no one should suppress the vote.
And as far as I'm concerned, I don't care if people carry the title of Secretary of State or not - if you are a policy maker in the State of Ohio, if you are someone who cares about fairness and justice, it is all of our responsibility to stand up and tell the truth. And the truth of the matter is, it is Republicans who are suppressing the vote. And oh, by the way, over 180 bills were introduced in states across this country by GOP-led Legislatures. And I wonder why.
Could it be because President Barack Obama is an African American? I wonder.
Registered Voters:
Obama/Biden 48%
Romney/Ryan 44%
In Swing States:
Obama/Biden 49%
Romney/Ryan 46%
African Americans:
Obama/Biden 94%
Romney/Ryan 0%
Latinos:
Obama/Biden 60%
Romney/Ryan 30%
Women:
Obama/Biden 51%
Romney/Ryan 41%
On Medicare:
Obama - No Change to system 50%
Romney - Vouchers/RyanPlan 34%
