The Republicans are taking no chances. On Election day, they are sending out thousands of recruits in Ohio and other swing states to try and find voters who aren't eligible to vote.

Good. The more people they waste on this effort, the fewer they will have available for important stuff like driving voters to their polling places and making sure their supporters vote.

Good for another reason. Undecided voters arriving at polling precincts to find Republicans playing the part of cops and detectives are going to be very annoyed. Maybe enough to make them decide to vote for Kerry.

I can just see my polling place now. On one side will be Democrats trying to ensure my right to vote is intact. On the other side will be Republicans trying to take it away. Who to vote for will be a no-brainer.

Hmmm...just how much of Bush's resume is padded? Knights-Ridder reports on a new potential exaggeration, totally unrelated to his National Guard service--his much touted public service work in Project P.U.L.L. If true, it shows Bush is far more the recipient of compassionate croneyism than the promoter of compassionate conservatism:

President Bush often has cited his work in 1973 with a now-defunct inner-city program for troubled teens as the source for his belief in "compassionate conservatism."

Bush says in his 1999 autobiography:

The LA Times examines who the soldiers in Iraq will vote for on E-day and says there is one paramount issue--which candidate has an exit strategy.

Jules Siegal at Alternet examines Bush v. Kerry on drug war issues. He points out correctly that the conservatives and libertarians have been calling for reform of drug laws more loudly than leftist democrats.

First, a suggestion for Kerry, which of course, he won't follow:

Many anti-drug war activists in forums such as DrugWar.com plan either to vote for Nader or abstain because Kerry is just another cop, even though he's softened his positions on drug enforcement since the campaign began. These are outspoken opinion leaders with very effective media information programs. Any convincing statement of sympathy would instantly move them.

Kerry could come out for a complete review of all drug policy issues by a blue ribbon panel of renowned experts. He needn't demand legalization, decriminalization or any other specific action. If asked, he would answer that he wants to know the facts before offering any positions.

But, in the final analysis, that shouldn't matter. Here's what does matter:

Markos of Daily Kos has a BlogPAC update. Kick in a few bucks if you can:

BlogPAC is making one last final push in the last 10 days of the election. (Click here to contribute.)

....Yesterday we launched our Draft campaign. The campaign has two components. First is the online advertising effort, which is running across Ohio on Yahoo sports. We'll expand that effort into sites targetting college students and mothers if we can raise another $10,000 in the next week.

We have also launched EnjoyTheDraft.com, a parody site that has been getting a great deal of viral distribution already. ...Enjoy the Draft is our first foray outside of simple online advertising. There'll be more efforts of those sorts in the coming years as we seek to find ways to use the web and technology to support our candidates.

BlogPAC continues to run online ads in the Dallas market targetting Republican Pete Session's "flippant and callous" attitude toward the Iraq War. And, it has matched an ad buy for Oklahoma's Tom Coburn on NewsOK.com. You can view the ad on Yahoo in both the Tulsa and Oklahoma City markets.

This has to be the feel good story of the day. Check out what senior citizens in Florida are doing to make sure everyone gets to vote. If these 70 and 80 year olds can spend hours a day in the hot sun, "bunions and all," so can we. Call your local Kerry campaign headquarters and see what you can do to make sure that everyone who has registered gets a proper ballot and has a way to return it.

At Kerry-Edwards headquarters last week, the seniors were sadly shaking their heads because an absentee ballot had not reached the man in hospice care in time. His dying wish was to cast a vote against President Bush, and if only he had signed the ballot before he died, it would have counted.

God forbid that should happen to one of them.

Why don't they like Bush?

They tick off the war, the economy, Social Security, prescription drug benefits, homeland security, education and the man in the Oval Office, whom they regard with suspicion for a perceived lack of intellectual rigor.

...So they stream by the hundreds into the office here, volunteers in their seventies and eighties, die-hard Democrats, many of them Jewish, still irritated about the famous Palm Beach County butterfly ballot of 2000.

Are they making an impact? You bet.

Author John LeCarre rips into Bush in this op-ed in the LA Times. Here's a snippet:

Probably no American president in history has been so universally hated abroad as Bush: for his bullying unilateralism, his dismissal of international treaties, his reckless indifference to the aspirations of other nations and cultures, his contempt for institutions of world government, and above all for misusing the cause of anti-terrorism in order to unleash an illegal war — and now anarchy — upon a country that like too many others around the world was suffering under a hideous dictatorship but had no hand in the events of 9/11, no weapons of mass destruction and no record of terrorism except as an ally of the United States in a dirty war against Iran.

[Link via Kevin Drum]

[comments now closed.]

Maryland is a state that allows some ex-offenders to vote. According to a new ACLU report, its system is seriously flawed and may block some of those who are eligible to vote:

... the ACLU report shows that states differ widely in how they determine when convicted felons should be allowed to vote. Only two states, Maine and Vermont, allow felons to vote while in prison. The report criticized Maryland's system as cumbersome, and prone to inconsistencies and errors.

"In other states, you get something in the mail that says you are off the book, you are eligible to vote," said Amy Cruice, community organizer for the ACLU of Maryland. "It's more clear when you are done with your sentence. Here we have nothing."

Here is a map showing how the states differ on felon voting. The report is here.

Former President Bill Clinton will will campaign with John Kerry in Philadelphia Monday.

Former President Clinton will appear with Sen. John Kerry at a lunchtime rally in Philadelphia Monday in what Democrats hope will be a boost to the presidential ticket in a crucial battleground state.

The latest Reuters/Zogby poll shows Bush and Kerry still locked in a statistical dead heat.

As part of a voter scam in Philadelphia, college students have had their party affiliations switched:

Calling for the legalization of marijuana can have an unintended side effect, students at Montgomery County Community College are finding out. It can turn you into a Republican. County elections officials confirmed yesterday that an undetermined number of students had their voter registration switched to Republican when they signed a petition supporting the legalization of medicinal marijuana in September.

"I felt filthy," said Democrat Micah Edwards, 18, of Glenside, when he learned what had happened.

And how about this?: At least two Ohio voters have received absentee ballots without John Kerry's name on them. [via Left I on the News.]

Here are five ways the election could end up in court again. And from Independent Media TV , Any Means Necessary: The War Against African-American Voters.

Update: Skippy follows the Nevada shenanigans.

Via MyDD:

"We are about to launch IraqDraft adding to the Internet rumors about the truth; tomorrow, we should have the video ad that's being placed throughout Ohio beginning on Thursday through the election. Also, I'm getting lots of nasty emails from wingers in Oklahoma about the [BlogPac]Coburn Mess ad-- a testimony to it's effectiveness."

What's Blogpac?

Do you need another reason to vote against George Bush? Please pass this one on. It needs wider dissemination. Robert Scheer in the LA Times writes today of the Bush Administration's cover up of information vital to our national security for political purposes. This alone should tell people that Bush does not deserve re-election.

The Bush administration is suppressing a CIA report on 9/11 until after the election, and this one names names. Although the report by the inspector general's office of the CIA was completed in June, it has not been made available to the congressional intelligence committees that mandated the study almost two years ago.

"It is infuriating that a report which shows that high-level people were not doing their jobs in a satisfactory manner before 9/11 is being suppressed," an intelligence official who has read the report told me, adding that "the report is potentially very embarrassing for the administration, because it makes it look like they weren't interested in terrorism before 9/11, or in holding people in the government responsible afterward."

Help get the word out by alerting your local media. [Talent Show is particularly eloquent on this news.]