Some Early Voting Problems

The Associated Press is reporting some early glitches with voting. Some of it appears to be poll workers just not being familiar enough with the new voting machines. And that appears to be the consensus among non-partisan observers so far as well.

Programming errors and inexperience dealing with electronic voting machines frustrated poll workers in hundreds of precincts early Tuesday, delaying voters in Indiana, Ohio and Florida and leaving some with little choice but to use paper ballots instead.

….

"This is largely what I expected," said Doug Chapin, director of Electionline.org, a nonpartisan group that tracks voting changes. "With as much change as we had, expecting things to go absolutely smoothly at the beginning of the day is too optimistic."

A precinct in Orange Park, Fla., turned to paper ballots because of machine problems. Voting was delayed for 30 minutes or more at some Broward County precincts, where electronic ballots were mixed up and, in one case, a poll worker unintentionally wiped the electronic ballot activators.

In Illinois, some voters found the new equipment cumbersome.

"People seem to be very confused about how to use the new system," said Bryan Blank, a 33-year-old librarian from Oak Park, Ill. "There was some early morning disarray."

But voting equipment companies said they hadn't seen anything beyond the norm and blamed the problems largely on human error.

"Any time there's more exposure to equipment, there are questions about setting up the equipment and things like that," said Ken Fields, a spokesman for Election Systems & Software Inc. "Overall, things are going very well."

Some voters even liked the new ballots.

"It was much clearer on what you were voting for and you made sure you absolutely were voting for what you wanted to vote for," said Cathy Schaefer, 59, of Cincinnati.

Other problems had nothing to do with machines. A location in Columbus, Ohio, opened a few minutes late because of a break-in at the school where the precinct is located.

My polling place had one electronic machine but I was offered my choice of using that machine or using the old paper ballot right away. I chose paper since the electronic machine was in use. I prefer the paper ballot, anyway. Those poll workers are doing their level best to do a good job. They deserve our thanks.

Once again, there are things you can do to ensure you get to vote.

Failure Omen

Tim Blair notices Michael Moore jiggling to the rescue. Yes, indeed, if there is anyone who can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, it is Michael Moore. Look at how much he helped Kerry! Thanks, Mikey!

VOTE!

After a bit of confusion because they had changed the location of my usual polling place, I cast my ballot. Have you?

If not, why not?

Get out there and vote.

It’s Absolutely True!

Dan Rather has the IQ of an eggplant. Confederate Yankee has the details. But this seems appropriate:

Pyrrhic At Best

Lawrence Kudlow takes a look at Democratic missteps leading up to the election and sees many bright spots in the final days of the campaign. He sees it coming down to a real horse race here at the end, not the long-jabbered tsunami that the press has been cheerleading right up until the last days of the election cycle.

A series of late-October, early November surprises has turned the midterm elections into a real horse race. The bullish stock markets of recent months have been saying all along that a Democratic tsunami will not materialize, but now even a decent Dem wave seems a long shot.

First, we have the John Kerry blunder: The Massachusetts senator badmouthed American troops in Iraq as a bunch of uneducated losers. This was typical antiwar elitism from Kerry, but his timing was impeccable. In a scorched-earth negative response, undecided and independent voters are flocking into the Republican camp, according to late-breaking polls from Pew and Washington Post/ABC.

Just as Walter Mondale infamously became the face of the Democratic Party on the eve of the 2002 midterms when he replaced Sen. Paul Wellstone on the Minnesota ballot (Wellstone was killed in a plane crash), John Kerry has become the face of the Democrats on the eve of the 2006 vote. It's a disaster for the Democrats — and they know it. "Kerry's Blunder, Wall Street's Gain," read one financial headline.

Then, we have the blockbuster 4.4 percent unemployment rate, the last major front-page economic statistic to appear before the election. Jobs in the United States are booming, as government revisions clearly show. Corporate payrolls are rising at nearly 150,000 a month, but the more accurate household survey — which measures the number of people working — rose 426,000 in October, 420,000 per month over the last three months and 226,000 monthly across the whole year. Meanwhile, wages are growing at 4 percent — almost twice as fast as the 2 percent inflation rate, which itself has been cut in half with plunging gasoline prices.

There's a bunch more things that Kudlow details, go have a look. The important thing here is that even if the Democrats pull it out in the end and take the House (the Senate looks increasingly out of reach even to the media) the victory will be Pyrrhic in nature. Because if they could not build the wave that they have been cheering for even with the much vaunted "sour electorate", they are in real trouble with a losing message. They will not so much have won as the Republicans lost. That does not bode well for them in the future.

The Ideological Battle

Arthur Brooks writes about the ideological battle that is going on within the United States right now. It is far deeper than the midterm election. Even a victory today for the Democrats will not be a victory for the left. For the divisions are deeper and broader.

….This midterm election, in the view of many optimistic liberals, will be a forceful repudiation of the inevitability of American conservatism. A victory after so many years of losses will mark the beginning of the end to the country's nightmarish reactionary drift. According to Howard Dean, "The American people are fed up and want to change course. Democrats are offering the American people a new direction." But will it really be the dawn of a new day for the American left? After a cold look at the evidence, liberals might decide to take the champagne off the ice. The victory, assuming there is one, will hardly be glorious, and long-term trends are still distinctly right wing.

Some doomsday scenarios envision a 45-seat shift in the House of Representatives and a substantial Democratic majority in the Senate. These predictions, when looking at the actual data, are probably unrealistic. My colleague Danny Hayes, a political scientist who studies polling, says that the most reasonable picture has the Democrats winning 20-30 seats and taking narrow control of the House, while failing to win the Senate. This assessment is consistent with what most mainstream pollsters are predicting.

No bloodbath–but still major progress for the left, right? Not really. We are in the midst of a deeply unpopular war, and an electorate in a foul mood. A Washington Post-ABC News poll last week found that more than 30% of likely voters planned to cast their ballots on Nov. 7 for Democrats specifically as a sign of opposition to George Bush. Congressional Republicans are hardly helping their own cause, between corruption and sexual misconduct. And the Republican Congress has so alienated authentic conservative voters with its porky profligacy that lots of Republicans will probably stay home.

I've had the commenters here who say things like, "The nightmare will be over when the Democrats win." Which says rather more about the commenter's lack of maturity and complete fundamental lack of understanding about how politics work than it does about the two political parties. But Brooks takes a very hard look at real trends and points out three major areas where the left is losing the ideological battle, and losing rather badly. Those areas are religion, immigration and the nation's youth. You do have to read his analysis to understand how he reaches the conclusions he does, so I won't excerpt it.

The bottom line on the election, though, is that it does not look like a tsunami for the Democrats and there yet may well be a number of surprises. But even if the Dems win control of one or both chambers, they have some serious, long-term challenges ahead. And this won't be at all what the left tells one another in their echo chambers.

A Cautionary Note About Exit Polls

The networks that pool together to get exit polling data are actually locking people into a room this year to prevent early leaking of exit poll data. These extraordinary measures are an effort to stifle the leak of the data to those evil bloggers. Oh, wait. I am one of those.

Two-by-two, polling specialists from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News and the Associated Press will go into rooms in New York and Washington shortly before noon Tuesday. Their cellphones and BlackBerrys will be confiscated; proctors will monitor the doors; and for the next five hours, these experts will pore over exit-poll data from across the country.

If all goes well, only when they emerge from their cloisters will the legions of ravenous political bloggers have any chance of getting their hands on the earliest indication of which party will end up controlling Congress.

"The demand for info is intense, and if the safeguards aren't steel doors bolting people inside a room, it will get out," says Marc Ambinder, associate editor of National Journal's Hotline OnCall. "The insatiable appetite for this info will overwhelm the ability to keep it secret."

So, unless their measures fail, there will be very little exit poll data until quite late in the day. Now, frankly, the exit polls are pretty well useless these days as the more rational pollsters admit:

"People need to realize those numbers aren't the real results," says David Bohrman, vice president of news and production at CNN's Washington bureau, who urges people to be cautious when interpreting poll results. "They show why people voted today, and what was on their minds. The only real way to figure out who won is to count the votes."

Mark Blumenthal, a Democratic pollster known as the "Mystery Pollster" on Pollster.com, which tries to explain the mechanics behind polls, agrees. Exit polls are "still a sample," he says. "Don't get all excited about it." In 2004, Mr. Blumenthal posted a warning in the morning about the vagaries of exit polling data and says he'll post another Tuesday. "You learn the hard way that a one- or two-point lead on a leaked exit poll is meaningless," he says.

Mr. Ambinder of Hotline OnCall, the free, wonky blog updated by National Journal's political reporters, says editors there have vowed not to post any exiting-polling data. They say that the less they post while polls are open the better. "If a header in my inbox says 'exit poll,' I'm going to try to resist the temptation to open it," he says.

Throughout the day, a lot of unreliable numbers on exit polling will be flying around in emails, predicts Jacob Weisberg, editor of online magazine Slate, which published early exit-polling data in 2004. If Slate receives exit-polling data from a reliable source in the media it will publish them again, Mr. Weisberg says, although he doesn't know if they'll be very meaningful. "When elections are really close, exit polls aren't that reliable."

"I'll post it with the caveat that it was all crap last time and will probably be crap again," says Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.com, a conservative-leaning blog, who will be doing interviews for CNN via a Webcam from his Knoxville, Tenn., home.

That is the important thing. The left has made much of the exit polls, but they are unreliable and pretty well good for not very much. Why the networks even bother anymore is beyond me.

Unintentional Hilarity

I don't think Eugene Robinson really meant to write the funniest column of the year today, but he just may have. In it, he decries the negative campaigning that has marked this election cycle. No, really, he does. The guy who specializes in venomous fulminations against George Bush and all things Republican decries negativity. It would appear that he has no idea he's being funny, either.

Has there ever been a more negative, dispiriting election? Is there any hope and optimism left in this country, or is our political culture based on nothing but seething dislike and sour resentment?

Democrats and Republicans sought to win voters with the same basic message: You may not think much of us, but at least we're better than the other guys.

Go over and read the rest if you want a laugh. Just remember all the ranting screeds he's written in the past and try not to spit coffee on the monitor. But at the end of the column he admits that all his cheerleading for throwing the Republicans out of office may not actually bring any real improvement in Washington. Because not being the other guys is not a strategy to lead a nation.

What Color Are The Ponies In Your World?

Michael Kinsley, writing in the Washington Post, takes a look at the almost completely unnoticed Democratic plan for what they plan to do if they win control. The 31-page document entitled A New Direction for America was released in June, but Kinsley may, in fact, be the first person in history to have actually read the thing. His conclusion? Ponies all around but not a hint of a plan on how to pay for all that horseflesh.

The document is full of bromides, of course, and like all good bromides, they come in threes. The Democrats promise "security, prosperity, and opportunity" in "diverse, safe, and vibrant communities." Not to mention "integrity, civility and fiscal discipline." They will "protect Americans, secure our borders, and restore our country's position of international leadership" through "homeland, energy, and diplomatic strategies." And we're only up to Page 3.

The two favorite words of Democrats on the cusp of power seem to be "tax credit." They promise to "modernize" the tax credit for research and development; to "expand and improve" the already ludicrously complex system of tax-deductible retirement accounts such as IRAs and 401(k) plans (and match "dollar-for-dollar" the first $1,000 a person puts in); and to provide a "100% tax credit for tuition up to $3,000." They want a "broadband tax credit" for Internet access in "rural and underserved" areas.

They call for a 50 percent tax credit for employee health insurance paid for by small businesses, as their solution to the health-care crisis. Needless to say, they love the tax credit for ethanol production and want to expand it for local ethanol producers. And — my favorite — they want a tax credit to cover the administrative costs of encouraging employers "to offer their employees the option to convert their retirement plan into an annuity when they retire." I don't know what that last one is about, but I smell an interested party. It's just not the kind of thing thought up by anyone who doesn't have some skin in the game.

In other words, pandering to special interests and proposing lots and lots of new expenditures and no plan at all on how to pay for anything. But we know what that means, don't we? Hang on to your wallets. Kinsley's most scathing remarks come at the end:

Competence, of course, brings us back to Iraq. Apparently and unfortunately, President Bush is right that the Democrats have no "plan for victory." (Neither does he, of course. Nor, for that matter, do I. But I don't claim to have one. And I didn't start it.) For national security in general, the Democrats' plan is so according-to-type that you cringe with embarrassment: It's mostly about new cash benefits for veterans. Regarding Iraq specifically, the Democrats' plan has two parts. First, they want Iraqis to take on "primary responsibility for securing and governing their country." Then they want "responsible redeployment" (great euphemism) of American forces.

Older readers may recognize this formula. It's Vietnamization — the Nixon-Kissinger plan for extracting us from a previous mistake. But Vietnamization was not a plan for victory. It was a plan for what was called "peace with honor" and is now known as "defeat."

Read the whole thing. Kinsley starts his article by asking people to read A New Direction for America - just not until after they vote. I think we know which side he's rooting for, then. But even he is unimpressed with the so-called new direction. After all, the new direction leads to a cliff.

Carrying That Last Pail Of Water

Right down to the election day wire, the Washington Post does its level best to drag the Democrats across the finish line. Today it is an article about "robo-calls", that the left blogosphere has been going wild over for the past few days. They, and the Democrats they support want these automated political ads shut down at once. Not their own robo-calls, mind you, just the Republican's.

This year's heavy volume of automated political phone calls has infuriated countless voters and triggered sharp complaints from Democrats, who say the Republican Party has crossed the line in bombarding households with recorded attacks on candidates in tight House races nationwide.

Some voters, sick of interrupted dinners and evenings, say they will punish the offending parties by opposing them in today's elections. But critics say Republicans crafted the messages to delude voters — especially those who hang up quickly — into thinking that Democrats placed the calls.

Republicans denied the allegation, noting that their party acknowledges its authorship at the recorded calls' end. After citizens' complaints in New Hampshire, however, the National Republican Congressional Committee agreed to end the calls to households on the federal do-not-call list, even though the law exempts political messages from such restrictions.

Whether "robo-calls" are positive or negative, mean-spirited or humorous, thousands of Americans are sick of them, according to campaign organizations that have been fielding complaints over the past two weeks.

An Ohio woman, who did not leave her name, called The Washington Post in tears yesterday, saying she could not keep her phone line open to hospice workers caring for her terminally ill mother because of nonstop political robo-calls.

Pamela Lorenz, a retired nurse in Roseville, Calif., called her own experience "harassment as far as I'm concerned" and said, "If I were voting right now, the opponent who's doing this, he'd be off my list for throwing that much trash."

Why is it the the only people who ever seem to actually try to shut down speech are the left? All the while complaining that their speech is being stifled, mind you.

 Note the highly subjective nature of this story. Nowhere is this "inundation" of calls being quantified. (I read something yesterday where one person said she had received six of the calls, I'll try to find that again). To date I have received four robocalls, two from Republicans, two from Democrats. But the Post treats us to anecdotes about the people getting flooded without actually getting a number out there. But here are two things that hint at a problems with the "evil Republicans doing bad things" storyline the reporters are following:

"I hang up as soon I hear it start. I've already heard most of what people have to say. I don't have time to listen to them," said Angela Elliott, a Fairfax Circle resident who is registered as an independent and has been getting more Democratic calls than Republican ones.

….

Democrats cited federal records indicating that the NRCC recently spent about $600,000 in at least 45 contested House districts for robo-calls, which are among the least expensive campaign tools.

Assume that this money is split evenly across the 45 districts (not accurate, I'm sure, but instructive). That's a bit over $13,000 per district. This is a flood? Or is this just the Post carrying more water. I think it's pretty obvious which it is.