Tuesday Night Linkdump #1.

* Republicans, no longer satisfied by stealing elections after the fact, are now filing election challenges before the polls even close.

Ordering the respondent New York State Board of Elections and the Commissioners thereof to certify the name of James Tedisco as elected to the public office of Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, 20th Congressional District, in Dutchess, New York, at the Special Election held therefor on the 31st Day of March, 2009, or alternatively enjoining the improper issuance of a certificate of election for the said public office.

Can't argue with the fairness of that.

* And speaking of Republicans stealing elections: Coleman's kind of doing it wrong.

* Ken Jennings loves metafiction, which by the transitive property means I love Ken Jennings.

* Terminator timelines. On a whiteboard.

* Star Wars as Dallas. Cute, but both these references are so very old. Between this, Terminator, Star Trek, and Watchmen, has this country actually produced anything since the 1980s?



* Mapping 'the zone of sanity'. Away from the coasts things aren't that bad, precisely because the imaginary growth of the Bush years never really touched these places in the first place.

If you'd asked me before today I'd probably have told you that runoff laws (like the one mandating the special election in Georgia today) were pretty stupid. But the ongoing saga of Franken v. Coleman is starting to change my opinion somewhat—a margin this narrow (caused entirely by the presence of a third-party candidate) is almost certain to be perceived as illegitimate by the losing side, regardless of the care with which the recount is conducted. A mandated runoff, unusual as it seems, would probably be far preferable to some + or - 27 post-recount result.

Perceived as illegitimate, that is, even outside the periodic discovery of uncounted ballots that favor one candidate or another. In short, this thing is turning into a complete mess. Nate, fresh from declaring Coleman the favorite this morning, is back to tossup-favoring-Franken territory.

Better than either choice, of course, would be instant runoff voting. Dare to dream.

MyDD crunches some numbers on the youth vote.

CIRCLE now estimates that:

* 23 million young voters cast a ballot on Tuesday, an increase of 3.4 million over 2004.

* Youth turnout will likely top off at 52 - 53%. That would rival the 1992 turnout, and fall just short of the all time record of 55.4% set in 1972.

* Young voters accounted for 60% of the overall turnout increase. That for the whole electorate.

* CIRCLE still estimates that young voters made up 18% of the total electorate.

The big story still remains Obama's staggering 66 - 32% margin among youth...

It's my last year in this particular demographic, so I'm very glad to see what we pulled off. Republican strategists can't be happy with the way that map looks.

Some articles for this lazy Sunday.

* "A Boy's Life": Biology, politics, and transgender children in America.

Brandon raced by, arm in arm with his new friend, giggling. Tina and Bill didn’t know this yet, but Brandon had already started telling the other kids that his name was Bridget, after the pet mouse he’d recently buried (“My beloved Bridget. Rest With the Lord,” the memorial in his room read). The comment of an older transsexual from Brooklyn who’d sat behind Tina in a session earlier that day echoed in my head. He’d had his sex-change operation when he was in his 50s, and in his wild, wispy wig, he looked like a biblical prophet, with breasts. “You think you have troubles now,” he’d yelled out to Tina. “Wait until next week. Once you let the genie out of the bottle, she’s not going back in!”

* "Rock, Paper, Scissors": A history of the polls.

Voting in America, it’s fair to say, used to be different. “Are you not a man in the full vigor of manhood and strength?” a member of the House Committee on Elections asked another Harrison supporter who, like Kyle, went to the polls but turned back without voting (and who happened to stand six feet and weigh more than two hundred pounds). The hearings established a precedent. “To vacate an election,” an election-law textbook subsequently advised, “it must clearly appear that there was such a display of force as ought to have intimidated men of ordinary firmness.”

* "Red Sex, Blue Sex."

During the campaign, the media has largely respected calls to treat Bristol Palin’s pregnancy as a private matter. But the reactions to it have exposed a cultural rift that mirrors America’s dominant political divide. Social liberals in the country’s “blue states” tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in “red states” generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion.

* "The Things He Carried": Jeffrey Goldberg exposes the joke that is airport security.

During one secondary inspection, at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, I was wearing under my shirt a spectacular, only-in-America device called a “Beerbelly,” a neoprene sling that holds a polyurethane bladder and drinking tube. The Beerbelly, designed originally to sneak alcohol—up to 80 ounces—into football games, can quite obviously be used to sneak up to 80 ounces of liquid through airport security. (The company that manufactures the Beerbelly also makes something called a “Winerack,” a bra that holds up to 25 ounces of booze and is recommended, according to the company’s Web site, for PTA meetings.) My Beerbelly, which fit comfortably over my beer belly, contained two cans’ worth of Bud Light at the time of the inspection. It went undetected. The eight-ounce bottle of water in my carry-on bag, however, was seized by the federal government.

* "Verbage": The Republican war on words.

Doesn’t this reflect a deep suspicion of language itself? It’s as if Republican practitioners saw words the way Captain Ahab saw “all visible objects”—as “pasteboard masks,” concealing acts and deeds and things—and, like Ahab, were bent on striking through those masks. The Melvillean atmosphere may not be accidental, since, beyond the familiar American anti-intellectualism—to work with words is not to work at all—there’s a residual Puritanism. The letter killeth, as St. Paul has it, but the spirit giveth life. (In that first debate, McCain twice charged his opponent with the misdeed of “parsing words.”) In this vision, there is something Pharisaical about words. They confuse, they corrupt; they get in the way of Jesus.

* "Thumbspeak": A brief history of texting.

Texting is international. It may have come late to the United States because personal computers became a routine part of life much earlier here than in other countries, and so people could e-mail and Instant Message (which shares a lot of texting lingo). Crystal provides lists of text abbreviations in eleven languages besides English. And it is clear from the lists that different cultures have had to solve the problem of squeezing commonly delivered messages onto the cell-phone screen according to their own particular national needs. In the Czech Republic, for example, “hosipa” is used for “Hovno si pamatuju”: “I can’t remember anything.” One can imagine a wide range of contexts in which Czech texters might have recourse to that sentiment. French texters have devised “ght2v1,” which means “J’ai acheté du vin.” In Germany, “nok” is an efficient solution to the problem of how to explain “Nicht ohne Kondom”—“not without condom.” If you receive a text reading “aun” from the fine Finnish lady you met in the airport lounge, she is telling you “Älä unta nää”—in English, “Dream on.”

The Blueing of America: Pharyngula has your images of the day, the county-by-county election results and the same map rescaled to reflect population. America's getting bluer, which can also be seen in Kevin Drum's comparison of pro-Democratic voting records in 2004 and 2008:

# Income $200,000 or more (+34)
# First-time voters (+33)
# No high school (+27)
# Latinos (+27)
# 18-29 year olds (+25)
# Under $15,000 (+21)
# Full-time workers (+19)
# Urban (+19)
# Non-gun owners (+18)
# Non-religious (+16)
# Parents with children under 18 (+16)

These numbers look good for the future, and the youth numbers are especially important for the reasons I discussed yesterday.

The turnout numbers are getting more and more interesting—it turns out this was a record year for Democratic turnout, not turnout overall. A lot of Republicans just stayed home.

Voter turnout is the highest since the enfranchisement of women, with the youth vote at the highest level since 1972.

The morning after, landslide. While it looks as Missouri and Montana may have stayed just out of Obama's reach, it looks as though he took North Carolina and Indiana in addition to Virginia, Florida, Ohio, and Colorado in a massive repudiation of the Bush legacy and a huge step forward for this country, on just about every level. (I'll update the prediction thread with our "winner" when things are settled in a few of the still-close states.)

The Senate is a bit closer, mostly because of what some are already calling "the Stevens effect": people say they won't vote for the convicted felon, but they actually will. (Josh Marshall is on a roll with this stuff: he also writes, "Now that Alaska seems on its way of reelecting its convicted felon senator and its (little doubt) soon to be indicted member of the House, I realize that perhaps I judged Sarah Palin too harshly. In the context of Alaska politics, I guess she really is a reformer.")

It's also a little bit unclear what's going on in Georgia, where early votes (still being counted) may yet force a run-off. Oregon and Minnesota are also razor-thin.

Terrible news from the West Coast as Prop 8 looks to be winning. California will be in the courts trying to figure out the status of this year's marriages for a decade, or at least until opposition to marriage equality is finally settled by law or court.

Neo-McCarthyite Michele Bachmann wins re-election in North Carolina, too. [UPDATE: Don't know why I thought she was from NC. Tough luck, Minnesotans.]

Turnout was the highest in generations, 64%, with more people voting for Obama than any other president ever.

Voting Rights Watch: The Department of Justice decides not to honor Bush's request that it interfere in Ohio's election, while North Carolina extends early-voting hours statewide in light of historically unprecedented demand.

A judge in Pennsylvania has the common sense to rule that backup paper ballots must be provided in the event of extensive voting machine failure.

A federal judge has sided with Pennsylvania voter groups and ordered election officials to provide paper ballots if half the machines break down Tuesday. The state had provided paper ballots only if all machines at a polling place broke down.

Why, oh why, are we using these things at all? The voting machines don't work.

Breaking news! Scientists have discovered it is possible for a Republican governor of Florida to be something other than a complete douchebag.

Gov. Charlie Crist on Tuesday extended early voting hours across Florida to 12 hours a day.

The executive order comes after record early voting turnout has contributed to long lines at polling sites.

As warned, it's a busy kind of week. Here's what I'm reading about:

* Obama returns again to North Carolina tomorrow morning in Raleigh.

* The N&O looks at North Carolina's answer to the butterfly ballot, the straight ticket vote that doesn't vote straight ticket. This is a very foolish way to design a ballot, but it has a long history in North Carolina, and it's fairly well-marked both on the ballot and in the polling place. I'm hopeful this won't be determinative of the outcome here.

* Some three dozen workers at a telemarketing call center in Indiana walked off the job rather than read an incendiary McCain campaign script attacking Barack Obama, according to two workers at the center and one of their parents.

* A PEW Research poll puts Obama up an improbable sixteen points nationally, up 19 among those who have already voted. The RNC has taken to the airwaves in a bid to retain Montana. In Ohio, 22% of the population has already voted, favoring Obama 56%-39%. McCain is only up three points in Arizona. In short, things are looking good.

* Another article looks back to Howard Dean as one of the forces (both before and after "The Scream") who made Barack Obama's candidacy (and, one hopes, landslide victory) possible.

* And another classic for the Palin files: forget "diva," a top McCain adviser says Palin is a "whack job." More at Washington Monthly, which makes the key point: "To blame Palin is to blame McCain. If the campaign is her fault, then the campaign is his fault."

An absolutely devastating blow for John McCain: it appears Joe the Plumber isn't registered to vote. All that hard work securing his vote, wasted!

There's a lot of misinformation going around about ACORN as Republicans try to drum up support for a big we-wuz-robbed lie next month. ACORN's released a memo that speaks to this.

Fact: ACORN has implemented the most sophisticated quality-control system in the voter engagement field, but in almost every state we are required to turn in ALL completed applications, even the ones we know to be problematic.

Fact: ACORN flags incomplete, problem, or suspicious cards when we turn them in, but these warnings are often ignored by election officials. Often these same officials then come back weeks or months later and accuse us of deliberately turning in phony cards.

...


Fact: Voter fraud by individuals is extremely rare, and incredibly difficult. There has never been a single proven case of anyone, anywhere, casting an illegal vote as a result of a phony voter registration. Even if someone wanted to influence the election this way, it would not work.

Fact: Most election officials have recognized ACORN's good work and praised our quality control systems. Even in the cities where election officials have complained about ACORN, the applications in question represent less than 1% of the thousands and thousands of registrations ACORN has collected.

Fact: Our accusers not only fail to provide any evidence, they fail to suggest a motive: there is virtually no chance anyone would be able to vote fraudulently, so there is no reason to deliberately submit phony registrations. ACORN is committed to ensuring that the greatest possible numbers of people are registered and allowed to vote, so there is also NO incentive to "disrupt the system" with phony cards.

Fact: Similar accusations were made, and attacks launched, against ACORN and other voter registration organizations in 2004 and 2006. These attacks were not only groundless, they have since been exposed as part of the U.S. Attorneygate scandal and revealed to be part of a systematic partisan agenda of voter suppression.

There's more at Yglesias and Daily Kos. What's often lost in the shuffle here is the fact that an organization like ACORN shouldn't be necessary in the first place. The U.S. government knows who and where you are—registration should be automatic, as it is in most advanced democracies around the globe. We'd probably have universal voting registration here, too, if one political party didn't have a long-standing self-interested investment in keeping "undesirables" from exercising their right to vote.

Are you registered to vote? A Google Maps tool will help you check your registration and tell you where to go if you're not.

Registration deadlines are starting to close, so don't slack...

Sorry I've been AWOL today—as I've said a few times the last few weeks, I've been busy suspended my blogging pending a resolution of the Wall Street crisis. Here's some links w/ commentary for the afternoon:

* Sarah Palin fielded questions at a press conference!

“Notice I wrote ‘fielded’ since she didn’t exactly answer them,” the reporter, Ken Vogel of Politico, wrote in his notes sent out to other reporters following the campaign.

There's a transcript at CNN.

* The polls don't seem to like people playing games with the debates. By the way, it looks like McCain will actually show up.

* The Keating Five Scandal in 97 Seconds. Expect to see references to this more and more as we head into October.

* Obama is reaping the benefits of his quiet decision to unshackle the 527s; these ads from MoveOn (on Phil Gramm, Rick Davis, and the economic crisis) and Brave New Pac/Democracy for America (on McCain's health) are both deadly effective.

* Voter registration efforts in Florida are overwhelming the state's ability to process them—a very good sign for those who still think we can take the state.

* It's a good thing John McCain is in DC solving the financial crisis, as his understanding of basic economics is unparalleled.

BARTIROMO: Sen. McCain, has Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke cut interest rates aggressively enough?

Has Ben Bernanke cut interests rates aggressively enough?

McCAIN: I’m not…I’m not…I don’t have that kind of expertise to know exactly whether he has cut interest rates suffiently or not. I’m glad that whenever they cut interest rates. I wish interest rates were zero.

At least the plane trip will give him time to read the three-page Paulson plan. As of Tuesday, he hadn't yet. Really. (Three pages.)

* And Bill Clinton is still sort of a dick.

I'd just add that McCain voted -- twice -- to remove Clinton from office during the impeachment fiasco; McCain has publicly mocked Clinton's daughter for cheap laughs; and McCain repeatedly trashed Clinton's wife when he thought she would be the Democratic nominee.

But never mind all of that. This morning, McCain wanted to score a few points, grab a few headlines, and bolster his bipartisan bona fides, and Bill Clinton was anxious to give the Republican nominee a hand.

The former president is gracious to a fault, isn't he?

Sunday morning politics linkdump. Sorry for all these linkdumps, by the way—it was a busy week. Next week should see a return to a little bit more sustained commentary (including the exciting return of debate liveblogging!).

* There have been some interesting debates about poll biases lately. Ron Fournier (grumble) at the AP covers a study that argues Obama would be further ahead were it not for racial animus, by as many as six points. FiveThirtyEight throws cold water on this, as well as looking closely at the possibility of a "cellphone effect" in the polls. If Obama does 2.8% better in polls that include cellphones, that suggests a shifting map like the one below, turning Virginia light-blue and strengthening small Dem leads in Ohio and Colorado.



* A study from political scientist Alan Abramowitz argues that Obama will win, when all is said and done, with 54% of the popular vote. That he's naively comparing historical models with this year's unprecedentedly diverse tickets in both camps shows how seriously we should take this analysis.

* A new PPP poll shows North Carolina tied. Other recent polls show South Carolina within six, West Virginia within four, and MontanVoteRonPaula within two.

* There's evidence of a "Palin effect" in Florida driving undecided voters to Obama.

* The Spine tries to get a handle on Obama's early-voting advantage, beginning as early as this Friday in Virginia. The second link has some stats of interest for Dukies and Durham residents:

In addition, more early-voting centers are being located at colleges and universities, a change that significantly affects student turnout. Students at the University of North Carolina and N.C. State were able to vote on campus throughout the two weeks leading up to North Carolina's primary contest in April. At Duke University, however, students had to make their way to voting sites in the city of Durham. While turnout for Durham County was 52% in the Democratic primary, only 11% of eligible Duke students voted. This fall, however, Duke will have its own early-voting center, open for business starting Oct. 16.

* The McCain camp has successfully demanded the VP debate rules be changed to protect Sarah Palin.

*Judge orders Cheney not to destroy his VP records.

* SNL mocked McCain this week. He also preemptively mocked himself with an article in Contingencies arguing (for reals) that "Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation." Straight out of the Dept. of Bad Timing. Obama's already taken aim at this.

* Will Obama raise my taxes? A helpful widget.

* And American Stranger has a long post on ideology that seems to take as one starting point my post on Slavoj Žižek, Obama Supporter. Essentially Ryan takes aim at the various binds the Left finds itself in with regard to political action, and I largely agree with what he says—though I certainly hope I wasn't in mind as his example of sell-out "liberal 'pragmatism' a la The New Republic." My point, both in the earlier post and now in this one, is simply that the U.S. President has a tremendous ability to make life better or worse for real people with real lives, all over the world, many of whom (believe it or not!) do not have cushy long-term contracts with elite universities. Naderite "Oh, they're all the same!" negativity only makes sense to people who are inoculated by class and privilege from the consequences of that power.

The mere recognition that the perfect not be the enemy of the good doesn't quite throw my lot in with TNR, I don't think, and certainly not so long as we also keep in mind that the good not be the enemy of the better. Our discomfort with pragmatic compromises—and we should be discomforted by them, every time and in every case—isn't by itself a reason not to be pragmatic.

Actually existing voter fraud: following up on the Michigan outrage from earlier today, a MetaFilter thread collects vote-suppression stories from across the nation:

Wisconsin
Mississippi
Virginia

Greg Palast has more. More and more I think we need a Voting Rights Act for the 21st Century—attacking the right to vote, increasingly the national policy of the Republican party, is the deepest, darkest betrayal possible in a democracy. The games have to stop. Elections must be fair.

And good for Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner for taking a stand on it.

In Michigan, Republicans think if your house is foreclosed, you should lose your right to vote.

The chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County Michigan, a key swing county in a key swing state, is planning to use a list of foreclosed homes to block people from voting in the upcoming election as part of the state GOP’s effort to challenge some voters on Election Day.

“We will have a list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses,” party chairman James Carabelli told Michigan Messenger in a telephone interview earlier this week. He said the local party wanted to make sure that proper electoral procedures were followed.

...

“You can’t challenge people without a factual basis for doing so,” said J. Gerald Hebert, a former voting rights litigator for the U.S. Justice Department who now runs the Campaign Legal Center, a Washington D.C.-based public-interest law firm. “I don’t think a foreclosure notice is sufficient basis for a challenge, because people often remain in their homes after foreclosure begins and sometimes are able to negotiate and refinance.”

As for the practice of challenging the right to vote of foreclosed property owners, Hebert called it, “mean-spirited.”

We saw these tactics before in 2000 and 2004, and I imagine we'll keep saying them in 2012, 2016, 2020, and on and on, until somebody starts prosecuting officials who screw with elections.

Undercutting the foundation of our democracy is not part of the campaign game.

Both mvy in my comments and Matt Yglesias at his blog have posts talking up the National Popular Vote movement. It's absolutely clear that the Electoral College needs to be abolished, and I think the NPV compact is a genuinely clever way of getting around the impossibility of ever amending the Constitution for this purpose—but I do have serious concerns about the compact's constitutionality, and whether or not it would actually be held up by the courts if challenged and/or reneged upon during a close vote.

It may still be the best fix available to us, but it's certainly not perfect, and carries with it serious potential for total electoral chaos.

Obligatory public service announcement: early voting is already open in North Carolina, so if you're registered as a Democrat you should get out there and vote for you-know-who.

If for no other reason, do it as a favor to me.

Here's a list of the early voting locations statewide, and here are directions to the site closest to Duke.



Now get out there and "make freedom count."