Here they are. Follow the link and do something. You’ll feel better.
I’m off to GOTV in the 614.
Cheers
by Dennis G.| 47 Comments
This post is in: Election 2012, Vote Like Your Country Depends On It
Here they are. Follow the link and do something. You’ll feel better.
I’m off to GOTV in the 614.
Cheers
by Dennis G.| 96 Comments
This post is in: Election 2012, Vote Like Your Country Depends On It
<a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/59124558@N06/8160103426/” title=”I Voted Today by dengre.bj, on Flickr”><img src=”http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7264/8160103426_6cd0d54cfb_n.jpg” width=”320″ height=”318″ alt=”I Voted Today”></a>
All that matters now is getting out the vote. In less than 8 hours polls begin to open.
24 hours from now we should know how it went.
If President Obama is re-elected it will be because of GOTV.
This will not happen by magic. Doors need to be knocked. Calls need to be made. The occasional voter and casual supporter need to be nudged to the polls. The voting process needs to be protected. All of this takes a massive volunteer effort. Be part of it.
Wherever you are, there is something you can do to GOTV on Tuesday.
Pick your spot and do something. You’ll feel better.
I’m in Ohio and I have to say that Columbus is Fired Up and Ready to Go. I can’t wait to get back and knock on some doors and re-elect the best President of my lifetime.
Cheers
This post is in: Election 2012, Open Threads, Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, OBAMA IS WORSE THAN BUSH HE SOLD US OUT!!
Nate Silver over at 538 has probability of re-elect at 92.2%. Sam Wang has probability of re-elect at 98.2% by random distribution and 99.8% by Bayesian Prediction.
If you haven’t already done so, make certain that you vote tomorrow. Run the score up on the bastards. Make sure you know your fucking polling place.
And now, with apologies to Pastor Dan, it’s time to ask “Is it too early to start speculating on all the ways Obama is going to sell out progressives in his second term?”
Oh, and Open Thread, also too.
by Imani Gandy (ABL)| 109 Comments
This post is in: Republican Venality, Vote Like Your Country Depends On It
I’m stepping into Kay’s territory here, but The Columbus Free Press is reporting that the chair of the Ohio Green Party has filed a lawsuit seeking injunctive relief and the removal of shady software patches which Secretary of State John Husted ordered installed into voting machines in several Ohio counties (Democratic strongholds like Cleveland and Columbus, obvs.). The hearing is at 9 am tomorrow.
Talk about cutting it close:
At 9am Election Day, a federal judge will decide whether untested and uncertified secret software will remain on Ohio’s vote tabulation and reporting systems in 39 counties. Bob Fitrakis, in his capacity as the Chair of the Ohio Green Party, filed suit at approximately 12:30pm on Monday, November 5 against Ohio Secretary of State John Husted and Elections Systems and Solutions for their clandestine installation of uncertified and untested software. Judge Frost, U.S. District Court Southern District Court of Ohio, agreed to the hearing to be held Tuesday, November 6.
The suit seeks immediate the injunctive relief of removing the untested, uncertified software from all county tabulators.
Should there be insufficient time or resources to remove said software from the tabulators, those tabulators will not be used and all ballots will be counted by hand if either the state or federal judge grants the injunction.
The Columbus Free Press’ investigation has discovered that the office of the Secretary of State has, at the last minute, contracted for special untested reporting software. Brandi Seske, Elections Council to John Husted, has penned legal memos justifying the skirting of federal and state elections law.
Since this story broke, the spokesman for the Secretary of State’s office, Mathew McClellan, has made false and contradictory statements to the press about the nature of the software and its legality.
Husted’s office has made every attempt to circumvent the law in order to suppress and now apparently steal the vote on behalf of the GOP.
If you haven’t been following this story, read this article “Ohio Secretary of State Accused of Installing Suspicious Software on Voting Machines” by Ugonna Okpalaoka at The Grio.
Long story short, John Husted is fucking up Ohio’s program in a desperate effort to hand Romney a Ohio victory.
Surprise!
[via Cleveland Free Press via Daily Kos]
[cross-posted at ABLC]This post is in: Election 2012, Vote Like Your Country Depends On It
On Sunday I had another great day of knocking on doors in Columbus, OH. From here on out it all comes down to getting supporters out to vote. This is true for President Obama as well as for all down ballot candidates and issues to be decided by voters.
So, what are your plans?
Here are the links where you can connect with the Obama Campaign in the swing States:
Iowa • New Hampshire • Colorado • Nevada • Ohio
Virginia • Florida • Wisconsin • North Carolina
And here is the GOTV link for the rest: vote.barackobama.com.
Also, too, Daily Kos and Worker’s Voice have a GOTV effort that you can plug into at this link.
I’m out the door in a about twenty minutes. I’ll try and put up a report this evening. It feels great on the ground–lots of energy, excitement and above all, a serious commitment to re-electing President Obama.
Everybody can do something to help GOTV. If we get supporters out to vote–we win. Let’s get this done.
Cheers
by Zandar| 115 Comments
This post is in: Election 2012, Republican Venality, Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Assholes, Ever Get The Feeling You've Been Cheated?, I Reject Your Reality and Substitute My Own, Nobody could have predicted
How badly is Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted trying to throw the election for Romney? Badly enough that on Saturday, in violation of a judge’s order, he plans to throw out potentially tens of thousands of provisional ballots.
Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, whose decision to try to restrict early voting was thrown out first by an Ohio judge, then a federal appeals court and denied a hearing by the U.S. Supreme Court, will be back in court again this month after he issued a last-minute directive on provisional ballots that not only contradicts Ohio law but is also in violation of a recent court decision and the opposite of what Husted’s own lawyers said he would do.
As reported by Judd Legum at ThinkProgress, Husted ordered election officials not to fill out a section of the provisional ballot that verifies what form of identification that the voter produced and that, if it is incorrectly filled out, the ballot will automatically not be counted. However, under the law establishing the provisional balloting procedures, according to the lawsuit filed against Husted on Friday, it is election officials that are supposed to record the type of ID provided, not the voter — and that election officials are supposed to attempt to resolve any questions on the spot.
Husted has until Monday to respond to the suit, and the court has said that it plans to resolve the issue before provisional ballots are counted on November 17, 2012.
So yes, if Ohio is close, and close enough to decide the election overall, then this is the story right here that will determine the Presidency. It amazes me that this guy is repeatedly allowed to violate federal court judges and Ohio state law, and do whatever the hell he feels like doing.
I personally hope President Obama’s electoral tour de force rolls Romney so hard that Ohio is just another icing state on the 350 electoral vote cake. But no matter what, Husted’s actions here are odious, repugnant, and oh yeah, illegal. It’s voter suppression to help the GOP, period. Let’s call it what it is, folks.
The good news is at this point the extraordinarily desperate GOP is resorting to patently obvious nonsense like this, and it’s being discovered before Tuesday’s vote. People are at least aware of it, especially here in Ohio (I hope).
We’ll see. The obvious remedy to this is VOTE.
This post is in: Vote Like Your Country Depends On It
Alright. I’ve given up. I’m actually counting the hours: setting midnight Monday as the cut-off point for the campaign, as of this writing we’ve got roughly 59 hours to go.
Here’s the schedule for this household: Tomorrow, I head up to NH to pound the hills and dales there for Obama and some very good local Democrats (gubernatorial candidate Maggie Hassan and House challengers Annie Kuster and Carole Shea-Porter) while at home the spousal unit hosts a calling party for OFA. Monday, real life intervenes for me, but my wife will canvass for Elizabeth Warren in the morning — and on Tuesday we’ve worked out the logistics to enable both of us to truck back up north. We’ll spend the whole day with those of our friends in the Granite State who will be (I’m very reliably informed) exceptionally happy to say good-bye to us for the next three and a half years or so.
I gotta confess: at this point, it’s as much about therapy as it is about any actual effect from my efforts. I’m so wound up on this one that just the act of doing something has become a necessity; no sleep otherwise, and too many hours reflexively bouncing from electoral map to electoral map. Any screen will do. Cut me off from the computer and I just smear sweat and index finger prints all over the phone and so on ad infinitum. (O brave new world that has such gadgets in’t.)
But whatever your motivation, let me add to the constant theme of this site. You know the drill: it’s an existential election. As Schlemizel pointed out a thread or two ago,this was just a trial run for Citizens United. The .01% will get better at it, which means this could be the last time for a while that we get to try this democracy thing — unless the next Obama selected Supreme or two shifts the balance when another challenge comes up. All the other stuff too — no need, I think, to repeat all the reasons this election matters; we’ve all hammered on that theme for lo these many months. If you’ve got the time and wherewithal, get out the vote; protect the vote. If all you can do in the press of real life is send good thoughts, then do that too. Whatever we can contribute now, we gotta — or to steal from my favorite dead deaf guy, Muss es sein? Es muss sein.
And with that, I’m going to let my degenerate election junky out to play, and enlist a little hive-mind help: I’m desperate to convince myself that we do in fact possess the advantage all the data seem to suggest we do, and so I studied up on today’s Daily Kos report on candidate schedules today.
The good guys are winning the logistical battle, at least — our candidates and top surrogates have fifteen events on the slate today against eight for the R-Money boys. (Five of those are Jill Biden stops at Obama/Biden field offices in PA and OH, but even if those are less significant than rallies, our folks are still out-representing theirs by a notable margin.)
The itineraries also seem to suggest that the GOPers perceive the same need that the Nate Silvers of the world have pointed out: they are still propping up states that don’t propel them to 270.
But what caught my eye, beyond what appears to me to be a frantic GOP effort to play defense, is that four out of the eight Republican events are slated for airports, which makes sense from a logistics point of view, I guess. But none of those on the Democratic side do — every one of them is a rally at some place that actually sits in the middle of a community — schools, businesses, colleges and the like.
So here’s my question for y’all: What do you make of those two schedules. Is the GOP public effort today as weak as it appears to me? For those of you who are deeper in the weeds in political practice than I ever hope to be (looking at you, Kay, in awe) see all those airport stops and say “weak sauce?”
I know; I know. This is as pitiful a cry for reassurance as one will see.
58.5 hours, boyz and girlz. Let’s make them count.
PS: Just as I was getting ready to post this, my beloved, if twisted, spouse called to share a nugget gleaned from the radio. Someone talker has compared the task of quashing a Twitter rumor to trying to “stuff an angry cat into a condom.”
It’s a perfect description of many of the operations we attempt here in our happy internet playpen, is it not.
And as for the image itself: too true. I have the scars from this week’s vet-trip mandated transition into a cat carrier to prove it. Right, Tikka?
William Hogarth, An Election Entertainment, from the Humours of an Election series, 1755.
William Hogarth, Soliciting Votes, frppppIt Will Feel So Good When We Stop (Victorious…)Post + Comments (183)