Anderson@Large

Election Day 2008: All Soles to the Polls

The polls are open. Do you know where your polling place is? Great. After you vote, text  “blackyouthvote” to 69302.

I’m in DC, where I'm live-blogging Election Day from the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation’s Command Center.

We are operating out of the headquarters of the National Council of Negro Women on Pennsylvania Avenue, the “Avenue of Presidents.”

National leaders will monitor what's happening with black voters nationwide. They will receive reports from Unity '08 coordinators on the ground in battleground states, including Florida, North Carolina, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

We will also monitor calls to the voter assistance hotline, 1-866-MYVOTE1. So, check back here throughout the day for frequent updates.

You can also follow me on Twitter. I will be sending tweets to the Twitter Vote Report.

Party at the Polls

For nearly two years, the pollsters and pundits have had their say. But tomorrow is the day we’ve been waiting for. A record turnout of voters -- history makers -- is expected on Election Day.

When the votes are counted, history will have been made. We will have the first African American president, Barack Obama, or the first female vice president, Sarah Palin.

To ensure that your vote is counted, know your rights before you head out the door:

• Verify your polling location.
• Play it safe and bring a government-issued photo ID such as a driver's license, non-driver photo ID (hey, I’m a New Yorker) or passport.
• Don't "flaunt your vote." Leave your Obama or McCain t-shirt, buttons, cap, etc., at home.
• If your name is not on the voter registration list, ask for a provisional ballot.

Sure, in most states you can wear campaign clothing to the polls. While my colleague Eugene Kane got the memo, his local police department considered a "Blue State '08" t-shirt electioneering and detained a Wisconsin state senator.

So, you can either be a fabulous history maker or you can look fabulous. Consider: If you throw a hissy fit about the First Amendment, you will add to the delay.

That said, don't let long lines discourage you. Your vote is your voice. Don't leave the polling place without voting.

If you encounter a problem, call 1-866-MYVOTE1.

Voters Get Ready

I voted yesterday. It took about a minute because I was simply dropping off my absentee ballot at the Kings County Board of Elections.

I had to make it through a gauntlet of voters to get to the counter. I was pleasantly surprised the line was out the door given New York is not an early voting state.

And unlike, say, Virginia and Colorado, where a single vote could make a difference, the Empire State is not in play. One study found that “voters in states such as New York, California, and Texas where the probability of a decisive vote is closer to 1 in a billion, any reasons for voting must go beyond the any instrumental rationality.”

The rationale for the long line is all too familiar: lack of confidence in election officials. Several voters told me they were requesting an absentee ballot in person because they didn’t trust the political hacks who run the city's elections would process their application in time.

Indeed, that was also my rationale for hand-delivering my application earlier this month.

The voters echoed Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s assessment that the Board of Elections is a “joke”:

This is a joke...this public is badly served by this agency as any city or state thing I've seen.

If it can happen here, it can happen anywhere. So, don’t let the joke be on you.

Get ready this weekend. Buy some bottled water and snacks to bring to the polls, along with patience and determination on Election Day.

Electoral College Daze

Five days and counting. But some voters aren’t waiting. They’re turning out in droves.

Barack Obama has a 19-point lead among early voters, but polls show the race is too close to call. In Florida, for instance, Obama has a two-point lead over John McCain.

Will history repeat itself? There’s already chaos at the polls, lawsuits are flying, and both parties have lawyered up. What if Obama wins the popular vote but loses the Electoral College vote?

CNN’s William Schneider recently asked:

Why isn’t there more rage over the Electoral College because it violates democratic norms?

Schneider added:

There was so much rage over Florida, people didn’t think about the Electoral College. But if it happens again, twice within 10 years, it would be intolerable to Americans.

For African Americans, it would be more than intolerable. The New York Times reports:

Wounds have not healed here in Duval County since the mangled presidential election of 2000, when more than 26,000 ballots were discarded as invalid for being improperly punched. Nearly 40 percent of the votes were thrown out in the predominantly Democratic-leaning African-American communities around Jacksonville, a reality that has caused suspicions of racial bias to linger, even though intentional disenfranchisement was never proved.

Now, in a show of early election enthusiasm, more than 84,200 people have already voted in Duval County, surpassing the number of early votes cast in the last presidential election. Added to 33,800 absentee ballots collected so far, the numbers show that 22 percent of registered voters cast their ballots as of Oct. 27, county election officials said.

But amid excitement over Mr. Obama’s historic candidacy and the chance that the country might choose an African-American president within a matter of days, there is an unmistakable sense of anxiety among blacks here that something will go wrong, that victory will slip away.

Jews for Obama

Sarah Silverman should STFU.

Sarah has organized “The Great Schlep” to encourage Jewish grandchildren to visit their grandparents in Florida and urge them to vote for Barack Obama.

Sarah's video has more than one million views, but she knows bupkis about politics. According to a Gallup poll, 75 percent of Jewish Americans plan to vote for Obama.

During a public forum on American Jews and the 2008 presidential election, Prof. Steven Cohen, director of the Berman Jewish Policy Archive at NYU Wagner, said:

Older Jews are more likely to vote for Obama than younger ones…Jews are voting for Obama in the same percentage as they voted for past Democratic presidential candidates.

Cohen said younger Jews are more likely to intermarry and tend to be less ethnically Jewish in their political identity. Also, a higher percentage of Jews aged 18-29 are Orthodox. While non-Orthodox Jews favor Obama, 80 percent of Orthodox Jews support John McCain.

Cohen noted his survey found that Jewish support for Obama is not about his policy positions; rather, it's about their political identity:

With the possible exception of their concerns for Israel’s security and Iran, Jews’ political values incline them to support Obama. However, multivariate analysis demonstrates that the Jewish/white gap in vote intentions cannot be well-explained by their differences in political values, by such demographic factors as education and income, or by religiosity-secularity, a factor that has been shown to influence the vote even more than economic standing.

Only one factor substantially explains the Jewish/non-Jewish white gap in vote intentions: “Political identity,” the tendency for Jews to identify as liberals and as Democrats rather than conservatives and Republicans.

The bottom line: Jewish grandmothers—Sarah's bubbes—should schlep to swing states and tell their grandchildren to vote for Obama.

DIY Voter Protection 2.0

Election Day is seven days away, but the specter of another “Florida” looms. There are unreliable voting machines, inaccurate voter databases, rejected military ballots, confusing ballot design and unlawful voter purges.

Florida is in the running to be the next “Florida,” along with Georgia, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

And Ohio. President Bush has asked the Department of Justice to investigate the status of 200,000 newly registered voters whose names were flagged as mismatches in a state database. If challenged at the polls, they will be given a provisional ballot.

In the 2006 election, as many as 20 percent of provisional ballots were not counted in some states.

Americans should be outraged that $3 billion later, states still are not ready. The 2002 Help America Vote Act was intended to help voters and restore confidence in the electoral process. Instead, vendors have helped themselves to taxpayers’ money.

Clearly, electoral reform must be on the policy agenda for the new Congress. But first we have to get through next Tuesday.

Already, the phones are ringing off the hook at the voter assistance hotlines. As reports of voting irregularities continue to come in, folks are getting jittery.

But some are twittering to protect the vote.

Beka Economopoulos, one of the organizers of the Twitter Voter Report, wrote:

Volunteers across the country are moving quickly to build a decentralized election monitoring system that will allow voters to use text messages to report incidents of voter suppression, long lines, broken machines, and other disruptions on Election Day. The Twitter Vote Report site will aggregate the reporting data, represent it in real-time on a dynamic web map, and notify voters, election monitoring groups, and the media, facilitating rapid response by poll workers and activists.

I asked Volunteer Coordinator Matt Cooperrider how folks can get involved:

If they just come to the page, they can help. There are lots of aspects. So no matter their experience, they can get involved. No technical knowledge is required.

For more info, go here.

Polls Apart

With eight days to go, the polls are all over the place. Barack Obama leads in the daily tracking polls and CNN’s poll of polls. Obama’s advantage over John McCain ranges from four percentage points to eight points.

When one factors in the six percent of voters who are “undecided,” the margin of error and the unknowable variable of race, well, the race is far from over.

CNN Senior Political Analyst William Schneider, recently observed:

Very few of those unsure are African American. It is possible that in the end, they will vote for John McCain. That’s not the Bradley effect unless they are lying about being unsure.

A panel of pollsters discussed Gallup’s likely voter model models. For the first time, Gallup is offering two likely voter models. Using the traditional screen (re: past behavior and current intention to vote), Obama has a five-point lead. But using an “expanded” likely voter screen, Obama's lead expands to nine points.

Though the two models suggest that Gallup is hedging its bet, Schneider said:

If you register this year, you’re likely to vote. Voting history is not determinative.

Indeed, the faces behind Gallup’s current likely voters are newly registered African Americans and young people.

Clearly, Obama can count on black folks. There has been a surge in African American turnout. In Georgia, for instance, blacks (including my niece Cheryl) represent 35 percent of people who voted early. In North Carolina, blacks make up 21 percent of registered voters but account for 28 percent of early voters.

A study by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement found:

This year’s general election follows a primary season in which more than 6.5 million young people under the age of 30 participated. Moreover, youth voter turnout in the 2008 primaries and caucuses nearly doubled compared to the 2000 primary.

In 2004, turnout among 18-to-29 year-olds was up nine percentage points over 2000. Whether the voter mobilization momentum of 2008 primary season—which witnessed an eight percentage point increase in youth voter turnout from 9 percent in 2000 to 17 percent in 20083—continues into the general election remains unpredictable.

If young people do indeed rock the vote on Election Day, it may be over.