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Friday, October 31, 2008
Getting a Handel on long voting lines
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A friend of mine just called — he and his wife spent five and a half hours waiting to vote on North Roswell Road.
Yesterday, my wife spent four hours waiting at the Fulton County Courthouse. I’m just hoping that all this makes it easier when I try to vote Tuesday.
Down in Florida, long lines earlier in the week shrank considerably after Gov. Charlie Crist ordered longer polling hours and weekend voting. He took some heat from fellow Republicans for doing so, under the theory that allowing more votes is better for Democrats. But he did the right thing. In North Carolina, the Board of Elections also voted Thursday to give local counties the option of staying open longer to ease the crunch, and many are doing so.
Not here in Georgia. Secretary of State Karen Handel refuses to try to extend voting hours, claiming in part that her hands are bound by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires federal pre-approval of changes in voting procedure. However, that didn’t seem to be a problem in North Carolina, where 40 counties are also bound under Section 5.
Handel also lost an important and embarrassing case this week in the Georgia Supreme Court. Two judges had already ruled that Handel was wrong to try to bar Jim Powell, a Democrat, from running for the Public Service Commission. Both judges had ruled that Powell easily met state residency requirements, but Handel insisted on appealing those rulings even after the ballots had been sent out and early voting had begun.
After I wrote a column taking Powell’s side and urging Handel to accept the lower courts’ decisions, she wrote a scorching letter to the editor. My column “raises the bar for illogical and absurd analysis,” she wrote, claiming that I wanted her to “apply the law based on some policy or political goal rather than what the law actually says.”
No, I just wanted the law applied as the judges had seen it. I wanted the voters of Georgia, not Handel, to decide Powell’s fate.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court kept Powell on the ballot. Citing many of the same arguments that Handel had called “illogical and absurd,” the court ruled that it was Handel who misunderstood and misapplied the law.
Did I mention their ruling was unanimous?
I used to think a lot of Handel. Back in her days on the Fulton County Commission, she seemed a center of calm, sanity and independence in a crazy public body. I had hopes that if she advanced into state politics she would be a Republican I could support, much in the fashion of Johnny Isakson. In fact, the AJC editorial board endorsed her for secretary of state two years ago, with words that now seem ironic:
“Handel understands the greatest threat is not voter fraud, but voter indifference; she says one approach to changing that could be a motivational campaign that would make failing to vote as unacceptable as littering. She also emphasizes that voting is not a privilege, as some in her party contend, but a right.”
OK, so we we’re wrong.
Earlier this week, polling places around the metro area were reporting long delays because state election computers had crashed. Those computers are Handel’s responsibility, and she insisted that those crashes never happened. Reports to the contrary were consistent and widespread, however.
It’ll be interesting to see what if any effect these long lines and delays have on Handel’s political future. She has been surprisingly partisan as an elections officer, but a lot of those folks waiting in long lines are Republicans as well as Democrats.
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It depends on what the meaning of ‘even’ is….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
You have to feel sorry for people like Rick Davis, John McCain’s campaign manager. In a conference call with reporters, he just claimed the race in Iowa is dead even.
The four most recent public polls in Iowa put the margin at 14, 15, 8 or 11. The most recent of those polls are those that report the biggest margins. I don’t think “dead even” means what Davis hopes it means.
The numbers are equally grim nationally. According to Gallup’s just released numbers, McCain is slipping a bit when he needs to be gaining:
PRINCETON, NJ — The political landscape could be improving for Barack Obama in the waning days of the campaign. Gallup Poll Daily tracking from Oct. 28-30 shows him with an eight-percentage-point lead over John McCain among traditional likely voters— 51% to 43% — his largest margin to date using this historical Gallup Poll voter model.
Since Tuesday, McCain’s support among traditional likely voters has dropped by four points (from 47% to 43%), Obama’s has risen by two points (from 49% to 51%), and the percentage of undecided voters has increased from 4% to 6%.
New reports by the Hotline tracking poll and the GWU Battleground tracking poll both show a one-point swing to Obama; Rasmussen shows a one-point swing to McCain, but within the same three-to-five point range Rasmussen has reported for the last five days.
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Obama tries to put Georgia into play
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Matt Towery, the former Republican legislator turned pollster, was quoted in the paper this morning as saying that “if the Obama campaign goes on the air with television advertising in this city, in this state, beginning this week to Election Day, Obama will win Georgia.”
According to Politico, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe said n a conference call with reporters this morning that the campaign is indeed expanding its ad buy into three states: Georgia, North Dakota and John McCain’s home state of Arizona.
That’s the act of a campaign confident of the outcome and trying to stretch out its margin.
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When history is written, debates did it
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Robert Kaiser of the Washington Post has a thesis that I suspect history will embrace when all of this is over: The debates did it. That’s where Obama won the race.
He quotes Frank Fahrenkopf, former head of the Republican National Committee and now the GOP’s representative on the debate commission:
“”I think it took Obama three debates for people to see how calm he was, how composed he was, that you couldn’t get to this guy,” says Fahrenkopf. “He was very well organized. By the time that final debate was over, I think he satisfied the qualms of the American people.”
I think that’s exactly right. There were no zingers in the debates, no meltdowns, no obvious turning points. Just one guy looking more and more presidential, and the other guy not.
REMINDER: If you’ve got a prediction on the outcome Tuesday, put your numbers in the thread down below. Deadline to post is noon Saturday.
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