For this and the three previous election cycles we at TPM has devoted a significant amount of our election coverage resources to highlighting and investigating effort to use bogus claims of voter fraud to suppress voter turnout and put barriers in the way of legitimate voters exercising their Democratic rights. (You can see some of our recent TPMmuckraker.com coverage of the topic here.) But whatever happens tomorrow in the elections results, we may have some tentatively good news on this front.
Jonathan Kaplan, writing in the Washington Independent, reports that the Obama campaign thinks GOP voter suppression efforts are, on balance, failing. You can read in Kaplan’s article the arguments between the Obama campaign and some progressive bloggers over whether that’s true.
One thing to keep in mind is that campaigns almost always find themselves in a delicate balance on these issues. They want to call out bad practices and be proactive. But they also reason that too much publicity about voter suppression efforts can have a self-fulfilling result — driving people away from the polls because they’re not confident their votes will be counted or that they’ll be made to jump through too many hoops. Whether that’s a valid way to look at it is a more complicated matter; but it definitely is the prism through which most campaign view the issue.
But our own reporting has shown that in almost every case judges have shot down the GOP suppression gambits in the courts. Again and again, the courts have just shut them down.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to be pollyannish. This is an issue where even if the glass if 95% full — it’s not nearly enough. It’s all about the 5% empty. But there’s some room for optimism, especially on how rough a time the vote suppression crew has had in the courts this cycle.
Also, see our earlier TPMtv reports from Monday.
TPMtv Interviews Obama National Press Secretary Bill Burton.
It’s fitting that the McCain-Palin campaign ends with a couple of politically motivated pretend nods to transparency.
First Sarah Palin’s own personnel board released a report earlier this evening clearing her in the Trooper-Gate investigation. Nice timing.
Now Palin has released a letter from her personal physician proclaiming her to be in good health and fit to serve — instead of releasing her medical records, which she’d promised to do days ago.
They see fit to do this on the night before the election?
(As a side note, the McCain camp press release is titled “GOVERNOR SARAH PALIN RELEASES MEDICAL HISTORY SUMMARY.” But it appears all they released was that letter (.pdf). Over at The Page, that morphs into the headline: “PALIN RELEASES MEDICAL RECORDS.” A letter becomes a summary becomes medical records.)
Obama takes Dixville Notch, NH. Second First Dem win since the midnight voting tradition started half a century ago.
(ed.note: Well, make that the second Dem. Apparently they voted for Hubert Humphrey in ’68. We were following the CNN reporter who called in the news; but it seems he got it wrong.)
As those of you living in California know, early on Monday some pro Proposition 8 ads starting running on TPM. They came through Google. So we didn’t know about them until we heard about them from readers. But we did allow them to continue running after we found out. Not surprisingly, we got a lot of unhappy emails asking why we were letting the ad run. I answer the question in a post I just put up at TPMCafe.
A nice view from my hotel room, past Obama headquarters across the street, where the lights never turned off, to the lake. A warm glow of a sunrise on a balmy fall day. It makes me reflective.
I’m hoping, of course, that today will be a fresh start, a first step toward national renewal. But of course those first steps have already been taken by millions of people, on their own, in their own different ways, over the past four years. Today is neither the beginning nor the end, but just an important landmark along the way.
My own first steps were not heroic or graceful, a series of small stuttering steps that eventually led to big changes. I was practicing law in Missouri, more or less happily, and enjoying our two toddlers, when Hurricane Katrina hit my home state. It was wrenching to watch from afar, a maddening combination of an intimate knowledge of the people and the place, a powerlessness to help, and a growing rage over the inhumane response and the cynical indifference.
Katrina crystallized for me what I wanted for myself. Within a year I’d decided to leave the law and return to journalism, trading a stable traditional career for a chance with a small start-up, TPM.
I don’t mean to put my journey up against the far more consequential and in some cases heroic efforts of so many others. The point is that for many people the effort to reshape the country, to get it back on track, to end the descent into corruption, cronyism, and a creeping anti-constitutionalism, began years ago and required real risk and sacrifice.
By comparison, voting is easy.
My brother checks in from Virginia:
Just an update from my Alexandria voting experience. We arrived at 6am on the dot there were about 100 people in line ahead of us. We voted at exactly 7am. Lines were moving slowly but steadily with no problems. Everyone was in good spirits. Precinct workers said that our area could see 90% turnout.
Election Day is no longer the campaign-free zone it once was. That and the day’s other political news in the TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.