Early Voting Wrangle

It's the first day of the early voting period in Texas, and here's this week's edition of the Texas Progressive Alliance's weekly round-up, compiled for me by Vince from Capitol Annex.

The Texas Cloverleaf took part in Blog Action Day this past Wednesday. Find out how you can combat poverty in your neck of the woods.

Bay Area Houston listed the fines for state representatives and senators issued by the Texas Ethics Commission in 2007 and 2008. Enjoy!

jobsanger discusses voting and registration. He says the E-Voting Can't Be Trusted without a paper trail, and ACORN Is Not Committing Fraud in their effort to register over a million new voters.

Vince at Capitol Annex notes that state rep. John Davis (R-Clear Lake) is misleading voters about his poor record on education in his newest mailer, and that the mainstream media is calling John Cornyn's performance in the final debate "less than senatorial."

In the first of a series of posts on past presidential elections, Neil at Texas Liberal offers up Who I Would Have Supported For President 1788-1820.

WhosPlayin goes off on a Republican county chair who thinks a candidate's sexual preference is more important than the substance of his ideas.

Off the Kuff takes a look at why some people won't be able to cast their ballot during the first few days of early voting.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme wants a fair election without Republican voter suppression and questionable electronic voting machines.

WCNews at Eye On Williamson posts on the fake controversy about voter "registration" fraud: Gone nuts about ACORN. And Diana Maldonado released her first TV ad this week: HD-52: Diana Maldonado is on TV in "Texas' Comeback".

Now that McBlogger has torn him a new cesspool, Joe The Plumber's fifteen minutes of fame are OVER.

North Texas Liberal dissects Obama's wide lead on McCain in the polls and the projected electoral map. Also, former Secretary of State Colin Powell endorsed Obama for president. (Start following us on Twitter for mini-updates and breaking news!)

Gary at Easter Lemming Liberal News has put up his Early Voting Info post but also announced he is rapidly becoming a clueless Cassandra.

BossKitty at TruthHugger is sad to recognize that Sex Scandals, Scams, Phishing and Your Bank Accountare signs of deeper disorders. Power, Money and Sex are hopelessly intertwined with EGO.

Justin at AAA-Fund Blog laments the loss of Gordon Quan as a future candidate.

Burnt Orange Report takes a look into the numbers of the latest poll in the U.S. Senate race and tells why it might be even closer than it looks.

Over at TexasKaos, fake consultant discovers a Gaint Load of Hooey in one of THOSE emails. Just for fun, he investigates the "facts". The result is an education in how desperate the McCain-Palin crowd have become.

EV 10/19: Blue Mizzou

Missouri looks like it's going for Obama, noted in the recent polling as well as the 100,000 people who showed up for an Obama rally in St. Louis and 75,000 in Kansas City yesterday. As Greg notes, that last happened in 2004 in Madison, WI and The Boss was involved. There's also some evidence that North Dakota and West Virginia are very close, but I simply cannot believe that either state has a legitimate chance to go Democratic.

Two weeks to go and it appears this election is coming in for a landing.

<p><strong>><a href='http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/interactives/campaign08/electoral-college/'>Electoral College Prediction Map</a></strong> - Predict the winner of the general election. Use the map to experiment with winning combinations of states. Save your prediction and send it to friends.</p>

Sunday Funnies

Texas SOS, Harris registrar fall behind in processing voter registrations

But I'm sure there will be plenty of provisional ballots available:

Thousands of Texans who registered to vote a few weeks ago likely will find their names missing from official voter lists when early voting starts Monday for the Nov. 4 election, officials said.

The voters will be allowed to cast ballots but may have to fill out special forms at polling stations or wait a few days before voting, according to state and Houston-area election administrators.

Officials blame a deadline-beating rush of registration applications before Oct. 6, and maintenance to a computer database of Social Security numbers, for the fact that many registrations won't be processed in time for the early voting kickoff.

But praise be, tax assessor-collector/voter registrar Paul Bettencourt indicates that only 7000 Houston-area voters may be affected:

In Houston, about 70 employees in the voter registrar's office will work through the weekend to clear most of a backlog of about 30,000 applications, Tax Assessor-Collector Paul Bettencourt said Friday. Some will turn out to be valid, others duplicates or address changes for voters on the rolls.

But, he said, perhaps 7,000 applications from Harris County residents will require extra verification and probably won't be cleared before Monday, the first of 12 days of early voting at 36 county locations.

The Secretary of State's Office in Austin must also verify the applications, using driver's license and partial Social Security numbers, before voters are added to lists in each county of qualified voters. But as the state agency works through the weekend to handle applications submitted by counties, it will take about 24 hours to approve each new voter.

"We were keeping up very well with the increased load, but we started to run a little behind when the Social Security Administration closed their (computer program) down for maintenance last weekend," said Ashley Burton, spokeswoman for Secretary of State Hope Andrade. "Since the start of October there has been a huge increase in the number of new voter records that the counties have submitted for verification."

No information was available on the database outage, a Social Security spokeswoman in Dallas said Friday. Nor were statistics available from the state on what Burton called applications from "large amounts of new voters" outside Harris County.

So as the conservatives continue to drive themselves nuts over ACORN, the voter suppression efforts contine to be the real story locally. Bettencourt says that ten thousand people missed the deadline to vote in this election (note also the statistics I bolded below for future reference):

Many Harris County residents may not realize, until they try to vote, that their registrations were submitted or mailed too late for the Oct. 6 deadline.

About 10,000 such registrations will be added to the rolls for future elections, Bettencourt said, but those voters will be unqualified to vote in the Nov. 4 election for president, Congress, county officers and other government positions.

About 1.94 million voters will be eligible to cast ballots this year in Harris County, roughly the same number for the last presidential election. The statewide voter roll has edged up to 13.4 million, about 300,000 more than last time.

The Harris County election administrator, County Clerk Beverly Kaufman, said 300 or so staffers at early voting locations are prepared to assist residents who want to vote even though they may be missing from registration records.

For voters who present a voter registration card or other identification — no photo ID is needed — but whose name is absent from the voter rolls, election workers first will call Bettencourt's office to see if their registrations have been approved, Kaufman said. In many cases, voters will immediately be cleared to vote.

Voters whose names are not on the lists may also vote immediately after swearing, in a written provisional ballot form, that they registered. But their votes will be separated from the main ballot record, Kaufman said, and will be counted after Nov. 4, if their registration is verified.

Or perhaps they won't be counted at all. Seriously.

I'm going to do a little shouting now.

If your name does not appear on the voter roll when you go to vote, PLEASE DO NOT FILL OUT A PROVISIONAL BALLOT. Leave the polling place and call this number: 1-866-OUR VOTE (687-8683).

This is also why you should vote early; so that if there are "issues" with your registration, they can be cleared up -- hopefully -- in time for you to cast a ballot that counts (with at least as much faith as we are able to place in electronic voting systems, anyway). You don't want to be experiencing this circumstance at 6:45 p.m. on Election Day.

And remember when you do vote that Bettencourt's Democratic challenger is Dr. Diane Trautman.

Update: Charles Kuffner has more on why this is a problem in the very first place. Shorter version: it's all about the Bettencourt.

Michele Bachman contributes $100K to her Democratic challenger

A little over twelve hours ago, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Freakshit, Minn.) appeared on MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews and declared that the media should investigate the anti-Americans in the US Congress, a delirium furthered as part of the delusion the McLame campaign has suffered from: the one that variously questions Barack Obama's patriotism.

As a result of Bachmann's grinning McCarthy-like hate-filled spew, we "goonbats in the liberal blogosphere" began publicizing her wingnut asshattery. Which resulted in online contributions to Bachmann's Democratic opponent, the one and only Elwyn Tinklenberg, of nearly $100,000 as of this posting. See update below.

What this says about the infrastructure of the modern progressive movement is nothing short of amazing to me.

A scant four years ago, John Kerry was paralyzed as this same line of Swift Boats attacked his honor. The media did not effectively push back against the lies, and there certainly was no coordinated response from Kerry's supporters, online or off.

To be certain, Kerry himself should have fought back harder. But Barack Obama and his campaign has had nothing to do with the Bachmann matter; this has been an instant reaction to the rantings of lunatic Republican in favor of her obscure Democratic challenger in the form of cold, hard cash from the netroots.

Matthews challenged Bachmann's ludicrous assertions straight away; Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow followed up on their subsequent MSNBC programs, and Daily Kos advanced the response by picking up the YouTubes of Bachmann's playing kissyface with Bush, then denouncing him more recently as his popularity withered. The left's leading blog also found and posted Tinklenberg's site and publicly called for donations. The rest of us spread the message on Democratic Underground and elsewhere around the blogosphere.

If you went out to dinner last night, you missed the whole thing. On Friday, October 17, the twenty-first century progressive movement hit fifth gear, and trust me, it is zooming like a Porsche.

Update (10/19): $488,000 in 24 hours, with almost 250K of that coming online.

500,000 early voters in Harris County

That's more than several states will have for the entire election cycle:

An unprecedented half-million Harris County voters are expected to cast early ballots for the presidential race and other offices during the two-week early voting period, an increase sparked in part by political parties and candidates urging supporters to vote before Election Day.

In response to the forecast of a record-high early vote that starts Monday in Texas, county officials have added extra polling stations and voting booths and new auxiliary equipment to keep waiting lines as short as possible.

Also, Harris County Clerk Beverly Kaufman has published figures on average hourly voter traffic at each polling station in the 2004 presidential election, so citizens can see which centers are likely to have the shortest lines this time. And she plans to conduct daily news briefings about early voting at five locations next week, from Humble to far southwest Houston.

Previously I noted that Kaufman's office projects 1.2 million total votes in the greater Houston area's county will be cast in November's election, and that's a figure that could portend as many as nine million votes in Texas (though I believe the final figure will be closer to eight).

There are several reasons for the anticipated increase in early voting.

The percentage of votes cast early has climbed with every past election, and the trend is expected to continue as voters become more comfortable with the idea of getting voting out of the way before Election Day.

In 2004, almost 40 percent of the Harris County vote was banked by the end of October. The total county vote then was 1.08 million, a 58 percent turnout of all registered voters.

With the participation rate expected to climb along with the use of the early voting options, experts say at least half of the Harris County votes — a half-million or more — will be cast before Nov. 4.

And both parties are gearing up their GOTV efforts ...

The local Republican Party will distribute at least 150,000 "door-hanger" campaign cards in some of its stronghold neighborhoods to get voters to the polls early, chairman Jared Woodfill said.

The Harris County Democratic Party on its Web site urged voters to cast early ballots, explaining: "It allows us to focus on voters who have yet to vote and getting them to the polls."

Some campaign strategists keep meticulous computerized records of voters who have voted early in past elections and will direct some of their limited telephone and mail resources at those voters, Republican consultant Allen Blakemore said.

Many candidates who have been hoarding money for a late deluge of TV, radio and Internet ads will join the onslaught of political messages next week.

The local GOP has also concentrated on sending mail-in ballots to identifiable suburban seniors who reliably vote Republican, and have been bragging that their mail-in ballots will bear significant fruit this time.

Meanwhile the good guys are going to have a bit more fun with it:

Featured speakers include Rick Noriega and Ron Kirk. There won't be a candidate or a band or one of your friends there that you will want to miss. And if for some inexplicable reason you still need to be reminded about why you need to vote Democratic in this election ...



Update: "Turning Houston Blue", from Dave Mann at the Texas Observer (disregard his negative subhead):

... Houston is essentially its own swing state within Texas. Harris County, which encompasses the city and its suburbs, is home to 3.9 million people, outnumbering the populations of 23 states, and is roughly the same population as Oregon. Now consider that Harris County—in theory, at least—is already Democratic. Surveys and polls repeatedly show that more of its eligible voters identify with Democrats. It’s just that many of those people don’t vote. Moreover, the area is growing. Subdivisions are sprouting at the city’s edge like weeds. The people moving in are mostly Democrats. Harris County is undergoing a demographic shift that will soon put Anglos in the minority.

Practically speaking, a Democrat can’t win a statewide race in Texas without carrying Harris County. If the party can increase its turnout just enough in this presidential year to turn Harris County blue, Democrats will control five of the state’s largest counties and could become competitive again in races for governor, lieutenant governor, and U.S. Senate. Democrats are feeling the urgency to capture a statewide race and at least one chamber of the Texas Legislature by 2010 to gain a say in the next round of legislative and congressional redistricting.

But Houston’s size and shifting demographics have local Democrats dreaming well beyond the Governor’s Mansion. They talk of a day when Houston could be for Texas what Philadelphia has been for Pennsylvania—a metro area that votes so overwhelmingly Democratic it provides a large enough advantage to deliver the state almost by itself. (In the 2004 election, Philadelphia handed Democrats a 400,000-vote edge in the state’s largest population center—a margin Republican areas of Pennsylvania couldn’t surmount.)

Harris County Democratic Party Chair Gerry Birnberg points out that if big margins in Houston could help a Democratic presidential candidate capture Texas, the Electoral College map would shift decisively. He says New York and California likely will vote Democratic for a generation. “If you can start a presidential cycle with California, New York and Texas already in your column, there is not an electoral map you can draw that a Republican candidate can win,” Birnberg says. “Harris County is ground zero. We don’t get there without Harris County.”