Wallace Reed, of Vinton, 92, who voted from his car | Shot by Dan

A little more than a week ago, Wallace Reed of Vinton was down in Florida for his sister’s funeral when he took a tumble.

He broke his hip and fractured a vertebrae in his neck — notice the collar in the shot below.

He was brought back to Roanoke via an air ambulance flight that cost $10,000 (that was a discount). And he’s been in a rehab center ever since. He got back one day too late to get a absentee ballot, said his daughter, Vickie Martines.

But he would not be deterred from voting Tuesday.

“He told me he’s voted in every presidential election since Roosevelt,” she said. “He wasn’t going to let a broken hip and a fractured neck stop him.”

A little after lunchtime, Martines and her husband, David, picked up Reed at the rehab center where he’s living right now. I met them at the Vinton Senior Center, where they took him to vote.

He couldn’t get out of her car, so he sat there in the front passenger seat while an election official brought a portable voting machine out to him.

“I’m voting for Harry Byrd!” Reed barked, as a joke, to the election official.

“Who’s he going to vote her?” I asked Martines. Read more »

Wikimedia Commons | Text by Dan

Note from Dan: The missive below is from Jason, an Ohioan and semi-regular on this blog. He had planned not to vote in the presidential election, until he got so disgusted by GOP voter-suppression efforts in the Buckeye state that he decided instead to vote for President Obama. He’s married, he and his wife have one child, and he’s an indefatigable proponent of concealed carry. More on the potential voting and Election Day issues in Ohio here, here and here.

We have a Republican administration that, with no evidence of voter fraud, has been fighting like Hell to make it harder for Democrats to vote. They targeted areas that are Democratic strongholds:

“In response to the 2008 election results, Ohio Republicans drastically curtailed the early voting period in 2012 from 35 to 11 days, with no voting on the Sunday before the election, when African-American churches historically rally their congregants to go to the polls. (Ohio was one of five states to cut back on early voting since 2010.)

“Voting rights activists subsequently gathered enough signatures to block the new voting restrictions and force a referendum on Election Day. In reaction, Ohio Republicans repealed their own bill in the state legislature, but kept a ban on early voting three days before Election Day (a period when 93,000 Ohioans voted in 2008), adding an exception for active-duty members of the military, who tend to lean Republican.”

It could not be more simply put than, “We lose when more people vote. Let’s make less people vote.” Remember, they weren’t attempting to cut illegitimate voting. Read more »

The big election begins in less than 24 11 hours has begun and it’ll end when the polls close in Hawaii. But we may know the outcome before then. Who’s going to win? That’s the big question — but it’s too easy.

So here’s our contest challenge:

1. Name the winner and the number of electoral votes he’ll take; and

2. Specify his percentage in the state of Virginia to one decimal place; and

3. A tiebreaker (if necessary): Specify his percentage in the city of Roanoke to on decimal place. Hint: Obama took the city with 61.1 percent in 2008.

Your entries should look like this:

Romney, 271, Virginia: 50.4, Roanoke: 47.8 

Your deadline is 6 p.m. Tuesday, which is an hour before the polls close in Virginia.

The person who comes closest will win a book from Dan’s Bookshelf and become the reigning political prognosticator of this blog.

And here’s how I’ll score it:

I’ll tally scores of all entrants who chose the winner in the race for the White House like this:

(Number of electoral votes they were off) + (percentage they missed Virginia by).

The LOW score wins the prize. If two or more entrants have identical low scores, the tiebreaker will be whoever is closest in the Roanoke city prediction.

Created by Dan on Zazzle.com

Did Virginia voter-suppression efforts flip a Romney voter to Obama?

Note from Dan: This reader asked to remain anonymous.

Dan,

I want to share my son’s recent experience with his voter registration in Virginia Beach.

He moved this summer from Blacksburg to Virginia Beach. In September he went to the local office that handles voter registration and filled out the form and turned it in. He was told he would get a voter registration card in the mail shortly.

As of this morning he hadn’t received it so he called the office to check on his polling place.  When he called he was told that he wasn’t registered in Virginia Beach. He then asked if the young lady could tell him where he was registered to vote. Read more »

Early voting in North Carolina this past weekend. | AP Photo

By now it’s well known that certain elements of our political system have used the last four years to figure out and pull just about every trick in the book in order to suppress Tuesday’s vote.

Most of them are arrayed against President Obama. They desperately want him to lose the election.

Some of the tricks are legal, such as voter ID requirements. A bunch of states controlled by Republican legislatures passed onerous requirements, such as the necessity of having a state-issued photo ID to vote. In many, courts have struck those down. Virginia toughened its voter ID requirements, too, though ours are less onerous.

In other states such as Ohio and Florida, the Secretary of State and governor have issued confusing and in some cases illegal orders to limit early voting. Those have also been challenged in court by Democrats (who also challenged Pennsylvania’s ID law) and in many cases judges have overturned that stuff. Read more »

Note from Dan: Our Post of the Day begin with a comment from John Wilburn, the small business-owning gun advocate and frequent poster on this blog.  He was addressing undecided voter (and frequent poster) J.M. White.  Wilburn wrote a short rant criticizing President Obama. And that was answered by White, whose much long response follows.

From John Wilburn:” J.M. White, for whatever it’s worth, there are plenty of ridiculous literal beliefs in virtually ALL of the religions. Christians are supposed to profess that the story of Noah’s Ark literally happened. I wouldn’t hold Romney’s religious nuttery against him any more than another candidate who claims to be a Christian. The debt is unforgivable. The two Supreme Court appointments were unfogivable. Yes, Romney sucks and was my close to my last pick of the 2012 Republican slate, but the prospect of $20,000,000,000,000 of still growing debt, a promised forecast of more gun control, and chancing the makeup of the Supreme Court to Obama is not a smart vote, IMO.

Of course, your mileage may vary and you’ll get ten tons more unsolicited input that makes another argument. But, November 6th is coming up quickly and it’s no one’s vote but yours….. Choose WISELY.”

From J.M. White: “John W, I know about the many religious nutteries out there and I did say that that shouldn’t necessarily preclude him from high office. I do have a problem with Christians acceptance of his religion, however, as it’s purely and simply a bastardization of Protestant Christianity. As such, it should be considered blasphemy by them. One hundred years earlier and Joseph Smith would’ve been considered a heretic and likely executed. Yet here they are, endorsing a man who only three hundred years ago they would’ve been considered an agent of Satan and burned him at the stake. That’s neither here nor there when it comes to how he’d conduct himself in office, of course. Read more »

Dsw4 | Wikimedia Commons

One of the most frequently cited pollsters in comments on this blog is Rasmussen. Not only is that company the most prolific pollster in the United States, it’s also one of the most controversial.

Nate Silver at Five Thirty Eight Blog recksons Rasmussen leans about +2 to Republicans candidates. Silver must be talking about in national polls. Because in the swing states, in the 2008 presidential election, Rasmussen leaned toward John McCain in 11 so-called “battleground states” by a wider margin.

The average Rasmussen lean for McCain was +4.08. Of the 11 contests, Rasmussen actually called the election the wrong way in 4. He had McCain ahead in Indiana, Florida and North Carolina, but Obama won all of those states by slender margins. Ramussen’s last Ohio poll called the 2008 race a tie. Obama won by 4.6

But don’t take my word for this. Look it up yourself.

Below is a list of the battleground states in 2008, followed by Obama’s actual winning percentage, Rasmussen’s closest-to-the-election prediction, and the difference between those two (the skew). You can click on the states to check my numbers, which come from Real Clear Politics. Read more »

Or, is there a higher-level game being played here?

Something very entertaining is unfolding in the waning days of the presidential campaign. A Republican governor, Chris Christie of New Jersey, is roundly praising President Obama’s response to the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Sandy.

Of course, New Jersey is no swing state. It’s pretty safely in Obama’s column. But the governor’s comments are getting picked up and broadcast into swing states like Ohio and Colorado. And it’s leaving many wondering whether this will be the tipping point for Obama in the election.

That idea has left RWer nutballs like Steve Doocy of Fox News stuttering in apoplexy. How dare the New Jersey governor — a Republican and Romney endorser, for God’s sake — praise the president this close to the election? What the hell does he think he’s doing? It’s pretty funny watching them spit and sputter.

As always, there are a couple of ways to look at this: Read more »

Note from Dan: I’ve been cracking hard on robocalls this election season because of their annoyance factor. I’m not the only one, and they can be far more an a mere annoyance. Here, we have a rant from MAD in Colorado who notes that incessant robocalls from the Republican National Committee are actually dangerous to an elderly mother who’s unsteady on her feet. MAD, you may want to buy your mom a cordless phone, and quick.  I hope she doesn’t break a hip.

“My Mother is 92yrs old and falls a lot. She tries to get to her phone to answer these incessant calls. She WILL fall one of these times. These calls are NOT A JOKE. Read more »

• Romney by 0.9 percent

• Could we see a split popular vote-Electoral College outcome?

• And could the carnage from Sandy influence the outcome?

One week out from the election, the Real Clear Politics average of national polls shows Mitt Romney leading by a slight percentage in the national popular vote. However, the closer we draw to the election, the less relevant the popular vote is.

By almost every other yardstick out there, President Obama is leading in the Electoral College — the tally that matters. Barring a big influence on the election by Hurricane Sandy in Pennsylvania and  New Jersey, he appears destined for re-election next Tuesday with something like 290 electoral votes.

Over at Five Thirty Eight Blog, prognosticator Nate Silver rates Obama’s chances of re-election at just under 73 percent. That’s because on Friday, 10 days out from the election, Obama seemed to have durable polling-average leads in the 11 of the all-imporant “swing” states, while Romney seemed ahead in only four. Silver has a detailed analysis of how improbable it would be for Romney to overcome this advantage.

If Obama wins re-election while Romney edges him in the national popular vote, it would mark a reversal of what happened in 2000, when the Democratic nominee, Al Gore, pulled about 500,000 more votes nationally than Republican George W. Bush. Bush won the Electoral College and the White House with a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that named Bush the winner in Florida. Read more »