Your turn

November 7, 2006

The president recently drew widespread laughter by labeling himself, “The Decider.” The truth, of course, is that Bush got it wrong. In our system, the president doesn’t decide, you do. And it’s time for you to make that choice.

I’ve been looking forward to today since, well, almost exactly two years ago. I suppose it’s safe to assume that if you’re reading this site, there’s no reason to remind you to vote, but I feel compelled to urge you to participate anyway. Even if you live in an uncompetitive district, in a safe “blue” state, get out there anyway and help send a message that the whole nation can hear: we’ve had enough and we need a change for the better.

A few thoughts/links as the day gets underway:

* Not sure where your polling place is? The DNC has a handy online resource.

* The DNC has also created a voter protection hotline for those who’ve experienced or witnessed voter suppression or voting irregularities: 1 888 DEM VOTE. People can record testimonials, which could be the foundation for any legal action, as well as a reliable central repository for follow-up contact information. (This number operates 24/7 in English and Spanish.)

* MoveOn.org has created ProtectOurVotes.org, which will be tracking electoral problems today. It will be a valuable resource.

* Just to be on the safe side, bring your I.D. with you to the polls. The rules vary in different states.

* Don’t forget provisional ballots, if the someone tries to stop you from voting. The New York Times explained a while back, “No voter can be turned away in any state without being allowed to vote. If there is a question about your eligibility, you must be allowed to vote on a provisional ballot, the validity of which will be determined later. But if you are entitled to vote on a regular ballot, you should insist on doing so, since a provisional ballot may be disqualified later on a technicality.”

* If you’re voting after work, get in line — and stay in line — even if it looks like you won’t get the chance to vote before the polls close. If you’re in line, officials are not supposed to be able to turn you away.

* If voting is particularly heavy in your area, and voting lines stretch outside, be sure to bring an umbrella, comfortable shoes, and if you live anywhere near me, a coat.

* As for today’s Carpetbagger schedule, I plan to write/post pretty much all day and well into the night. I probably won’t do my usual campaign-related round-up at noon, because, well, today’s Election Day and the campaign news is pretty much over.

Here’s to an encouraging day….

Yes. The electorate, however, marignalized by gerrymandering, vote suppression tactics and political thievery, is still the “decider”.

“Decide” and vote. Not much more to say.

  • Voted this morning and everything went smoothly. I’m a safe blue district in NC so nothing big is going to happen where I am, but I can’t wait to see the results at the end of the day…hoping for the house and senate!

  • I hope they ley us decide. I hope our leaders realize that criminals who can manipulate the electronic vote tabulation may be deciding our elections, and that we need to CHANGE THAT.

    Of course we all should vote, but if our leaders don’t get the seriousness of this issue this time, we should stick a fork in them.

  • There won’t be enough today, so I want to post one positive experience message. My polling place was properly staffed and officials from both sides (one of whom I’ve known since college) were informed, polite, and competent.

    It’s gray, cold, and raining.

    What a beautiful day!

  • I’ll be leaving work early today to place my vote — when I dropped The Boy off at daycare, some clown was campaigning against Amendment 2 (the Missouri Stem Cell initiative) at the polling place.

    I’ve already placed a call to the proper authorities.

    And I’ll be drunk blogging the election coverage/results here in the KC area (I don’t have cable, so I’ll have to get national coverage on the Intrawebs). I’ve got 5 Boulevard Bob 47s and a mostly full 1.75 of Maker’s Mark. I figure that and the Vicodin should lead to some interesting results …

    🙂

  • All went well in the MN 5th this morning. Polls opened 7:00 AM..MNProgressive was in line at 7:03 and was proudly sporting an “I Voted” sticker by 7:30. I was voter #48 for the day. The “gray foxes” staffing the church seemed ready and able to manage a good turnout today.

    Now I have to figure out what to do for the next 10 hours until the results start trickling in. Looking forward to dinner at my GOP parents this evening. I refuse to watch returns on FOX News however.

    Go vote! Vote Progressive! Bring your firends and neighbors!

  • No, Unholy Moses, don’t do it! Post-electoral self-obliteration is so 2004.

    Or let’s hope so.

    I sent my absentee ballot to VA (Webb, Moran) a month ago. Hope it gets counted.

  • I’ve voted by mail and will be working today at my local Democratic headquarters. May each of us today find a way to do something beyond just casting a ballot to bring down the dark empire.

    A bad day for the Republicans will be a good day for the country.

  • Will be voting at 6 PM tonight in my local Baptist Church. I’ve never seen a mid-term with ling lines, but I wouldn’t mind seeing a crowd tonight.

    I will be trying the ‘Optical Scan’ machines for the first time. Have no idea what to expect…

  • MN Progressive

    I refuse to watch returns on FOX News however.

    Well, I will, at least part of the time. Yesterday I heard a commentator there predicting that the Dems will take majorities in neither the House nor the Senate.

    I’m hoping to see some gnashing of teeth and eggy faces today. And the spin! It’s gonna be that the Dems didn’t win by the predicted margins, so they lost!

    I may send them an email and say I was a Republican who didn’t vote because they predicted a Republican win in both houses and I thought my vote wasn’t needed.

    I think that prediction wasn’t too clever of them. What will their audience think when it’s obvious they’re wrong?

  • Well, the Deciderer hasn’t declared Martial Law yet under the new and improved Insurrection Act the Thugs surreptitiously rewrote for him last month to make it easier to do, so I suppose that’s good news. (Didn’t know about that? We’ve got news up about it at the TAFM blog, which you can read today for reason to vote so it can be changed back.)

    Here in Blue California, the district I am in tends red, so voting on the state/local level is important. For anyone else in California, be damn sure to VOTE NO ON 90 and YES ON 87 AND 89. Let the corporate piggie-wiggies go blow.

    Gonna be an interesting night. Haven’t been this interested since 1960.

  • Anney,

    If I were more confident in the process and frankly in the electorate, I would watch FOX just to watch them announce the GOP is going down. I just don’t know if I can stomach it. Plus all the waving flag graphics tend to make me dizzy.

    I won’t be listening on Air America either. I think CNN or maybe CBS. Is Katie Couric anchoring the returns? Could be intersting.

  • Things went smoothly at my precinct this morning. That said, there isn’t much suspense in New York this year, but thanks to my wife & myself Hillary will NOT lose by two votes . . .

    Let’s hope for a good day in New Jersey, Virginia, Ohio, Missouri, & etc.

  • Voted, toddlers in tow. I live in a solid blue state, so no big effect, but it felt good. Smooth, too, as it was a paper ballot system – I was ready to tackle anyone I saw carrying a mini-bar key…

    I’m praying very hard for change. We need checks and balances now, so desperately, for our country, for our kids’ future.

    Glad you got back online CB! You and Andrew Sullivan are my daily stops.

  • Voting went smoothly this morning, except for some nitwit bitch who had the audacity to put a Blackwell sign in her front window—which is right across the street from the polling station. The sheriff’s department came out and gave her a choice—pull the sign, or “hold out your wrists.”

    She pulled the sign. As with most bullies, they cower and cringe when stood up to….

  • Just got back from voting. For Webb. Against the “Marriage Amendment.”

    Nice old ladies working the polling station, contrasting with the shiny new touchscreen voting blackholes we use. If they’re anything like my mother using e-mail, my vote doesn’t stand a chance.

    Tonight I’ll watch the results with a bottle of Ouzo in one hand and a Guinness in the other.

  • via TPM:

    (November 07, 2006 — 09:33 AM EST // link)
    And from Sullivan County, Tennessee, where TPM Reader SJ tried to vote:

    “Went to my precinct to vote and all 3 machines were not working. This precinct has a lot of lower-income families and public housing. They finally got one of the machines going, but the lines were out the door – I waited close to an hour and had to get to work. I wasn’t the only one – most of those leaving were young(er) working people more likely to vote Democratic. I’ll be coming back later to vote, but how many of those that left will be able to do that? You would think the machines would have at least been tested and working before the actual election day.”

    We’re not going to be able to post every anecdote like this that we receive today. It would be beside the point. We’ll be looking for trends and patterns. But regardless of whether you subscribe to deep, dark conspiracy theories of GOP election trickery, voting should be easy, accurate, and fair. It’s not. The system is broken.

    — TPM Reader DK

    Today will be filled with stories that run the gamut. But DK’s observation is correct. The system is broken. If some power is regained by a saner group of people in this country, I can’t imagine any issue which deserves attention more than our balloting snafu.

    I’ll be working at my Northern CA counties Registrar of Voters today as I have been the last two weeks. This morning will be spent, once again, verifying signatures and extracting ballots from absentee envelopes. At 14:30 I’ll be in a secure room with other workers running card reading machines which will tally the vote. It’s a tedious process but there is no other function more important to a credible democracy. Widespread, untainted participation and unimpeachable tallies are both possible and essential. But our current reality does not reflect those goals in far too many places and circumstances.

  • I live in a red-leaning area of a blue state (OR), so my vote for Carol Voisin (college professor, award-winning small businesswoman) for Congress, along with all the others she gets, will send a strong message to Greg Walden that we have noticed he is nothing but a rubber stamp for the administration. Walden’s opponents in the past have apparently never gotten more than 28% of the vote, but I think this year will be different. Walden isn’t one of the crazy wingnuts, he *seems* to be a moderate, yet he votes lockstep with the R leadership/Hastert.

    We also have important races for state house & city council, a school bond, sheriff levy, and some state initiatives that are really important (most of them need to be defeated). It’s very important to vote no matter where you live!

  • I had to vote provisionally, as my change of address apparently wasn’t processed in a timely way. I’m in a safe district & state (Illinois), so won’t be the end of the world if it doesn’t hold, but I gave my best effort.

    Joining some friends to watch results tonight, though I doubt we’ll know the senate results today (or even tomorrow), but we might know enough to know we’re taking the house.

  • Well, I also voted here in Georgia. When I went in one of the (approximately) ten machines was down.

    I forgot to check the voting machine name here, but it was a touch-screen. One of my sons is going to check out the name of the machine when he votes later at the same place. You had to really press HARD to get it to indicate each vote. In one case, I pressed one name and the other name ended up with an X. I redid it and it worked okay. I also checked the summary page carefully. Hope everything is counted right. We’ll never know, I suppose.

    I didn’t see one single “checker” in the place. The voting machines were all out in the open where people could see how you voted if they were interested. I would have been more comfortable if they’d had screens of some sort.

    One of the poll workers said that during the first three hours, ten percent of registered voters in the district had already voted. The turnout so far is even better than it was for the presidential election in 2004, he said.

    Don’t know what this means except that the church-folks are probably voting in large numbers. Everybody in line near me knew each other and were chitchatting about their church activities together.

  • #18 Yet another reason for all states to adopt systems like Oregon’s vote-by-mail. Dem US Sen. Ron Wyden was in town a couple of weeks ago for a GOTV rally and was asked a question about the voting machine problem. Ron said that his hope is that all states would adopt a system like ours. He specifically mentioned that Sen. Obama was very interested.

    Why would anyone want to wait in line when you could sit at your kitchen table and leisurely fill out your ballot as my family did? We receive our ballots two weeks before the election and can turn in anytime before 8 pm today. And our participation as a state is usually second in the country. MN is usually first – MN Progressive, you may gloat a little. 🙂

  • I live in the heart of Iowa toss-up country, in a Blue county but an R-dominant precinct. The good news, in a good government sense, is that turnout was strong and things went smoothly. The bad news is that turnout was strong in a high-R precinct. A small handful of machine and logistical glitches have been reported around the state, but nothing out of the ordinary and so far with no apparently pattern that would impact one party more than the other.

  • Hubby voted about 7 AM before holding a sign for a couple of hours on a busy street endorsing one of the judicial candidates we know and greatly respect. Lines were long, but getting through fairly quickly.

    I voted about an hour ago. In and out in 10 minutes, and the place was fairly well packed. One machine wasn’t booting up normally, so they moved me to another one. No (apparent) problems with the ballot. At 4 PM it’s my turn to hold the sign and campaign for the last minute voters.

    However, when I got home, I saw this little tidbit on 365gay.com.

    (Washington) Electronic voting machine problems frazzled voters and election workers in dozens of precincts as the polls opened Tuesday, delaying voters in Indiana and Ohio and leaving some in Florida with little choice but turn to paper ballots instead.

    In Cleveland, voters rolled their eyes as poll workers fumbled with new voting machines that they couldn’t get to start properly.

    “We got five machines – one of them’s got to work,” said Willette Scullank, a troubleshooter from the Cuyahoga County, Ohio, elections board.

    Election officials in Delaware County, Ind., planned to seek a court order to extend voting after an apparent computer error prevented voters from casting ballots in 75 precincts. Delaware County Clerk Karen Wenger said the cards that activate the machines were programmed incorrectly.

    Be afraid…be very afraid.

  • I voted at 7 AM in the south loop area of Chicago. We are using paper ballots which require a “special” magic marker pen. Apparently these pens are so special that the polling place was only issued 10 of them for the whole precinct. There were already lines forming because of the pen shortage problem by 7:15. I wonder how many of those pens will be left by 5 PM when the after work crowd starts to show up? The atmosphere was starting to be chaotic. I talked to a poll worker who said she had called for another box of pens and was told there were not any. I wonder how many pens there are in IL-6 today?

  • I just became a citizen this year, so this was my first experience voting. I gotta say I was very unimpressed with my baltimore voting experience. My polling place was in the middle of the hood, the staffers were very unorganized (granted, it was 7am and I was the second person there, but still), very unprofessional, none of them knew what to do with my voting card thing when I was done, it got tossed in a box or something, and to top it all off, the diebold touch screen voting units looked like they were running a hypercard stack from 1984, it all felt very…. shady for lack of a better word. I gotta say that, while I was very skeptical of the whole process before, (just from reading), after actually experiencing it, I’m completely disenfranchised with the whole thing.

  • Nick–
    Disenfranchisement in urban areas is exactly what the Repubs want — people in those areas almost always vote for the Dems.

    Oh, and over at Tapped, they’ve got a voice mail that shows what voter intimidation sounds like. You can find it here.

    It’s blocked here at work (natch), so I’ll have to give it a listen tonight.

  • After reading some of these stories, I’m glad my district still uses punch card ballots …

    My district switched to optical scan, and I really miss the punch card ballots. Spent a half-hour filling in little circles on a Scantron-like form. The shredding sound the scanning machine makes when you insert your ballot didn’t fill me with a lot of confidence.

    Oh, and the poll workers were completely confused about what was an acceptable form of ID in Missouri. They were demanding photo ID despite a state supreme court ruling otherwise. You know its going to be bad when the Missouri Secretary of State — the state’s top elections official — gets hassled trying to cast an absentee ballot. Naturally, she’s a Democrat.

    I got a bad feeling about today …

  • I got a bad feeling about today …
    –brainiac

    You and me both.

    I think I’ll volunteer as/apply for an election official for ’08. I’m a former IT guy, am familiar with the law, and not registered with either party.

    Of course, I’m under the age of 90, so not sure if I’ll qualify …

  • I live in the part of PA which James Carville famously refers to as Alabama, as in, Pennsylvania is Pittsburgh and Philadelphia with Alabama in between.

    I’ve just returned form voting and I voted straight Democratic.
    Everything went smoothly. However, we are using touch screen machines with no paper trail, consequently I really don’t know.

  • Ohioan,

    I will be trying the ‘Optical Scan’ machines for the first time. Have no idea what to expect…

    Ever take a multiple choice test using a form with little bubbles you filled in to indicate your answer? if so, then you should recognize the Optical Scan voting method.

    More on topic, I’ll be voting tonight after work in my safely blue district of CA. However, there are some critical propositions to vote on and a protest vote against Herr Gropinator. I’ll watch the evening news and celebrate the Dem success with Champagne.

  • (Aw man, we have to do MATH now? And I have to change my name.)

    If there’s a God in Heaven:

    The Democrats will sweep because we, the people of the US and the world can’t take any more of this crap..

    If there’s a God in Heaven:

    The Repugs will stay in power because we won’t demand radical changes to the status quo if the pressure eases off a bit.

    There, I’ve hedged my bets, and I’m going to guzzle some more PeptoBismol.

    • Comments are closed.