I'm writing this while on a conference call with OFA. As I glance up from the screen and out of my front room window, three young OFA volunteers are canvassing our neighborhood, knocking on doors cheerfully and respectfully. I recognize one of them as a young lady who went to school with my daughter. They're out canvassing for all Democrats, not only Barack Obama.

This is the heart of the OFA community organizing effort. Today they launched their final phase -- the get out the vote effort. This follows the first two prongs, which include in-community contact to persuade undecided voters, and new voter registrations.

The campaign reports that these outreach efforts have reached 125 million voters, and those are face-to-face interactions, not robocalls or other automated contact methods. They are conversations, and they're conversations volunteers have been having for years. Unlike Republicans, OFA has relied on a grassroots face-to-face approach to reach new voters.

From the campaign:

As our Neighborhood Team Leaders opened their staging locations this morning, they began logging into our state-of-the-art reporting system, officially launching their GOTV hubs. Unlike campaigns of the past, our volunteers are not driving to some large office miles from their homes and handed a phone and a call sheet. Instead, Canvass Captains, Phone Bank Captains and scores of local volunteers will be knocking on the doors of the very voters they registered, have been talking to for months and know personally. And they will be directing them to polling locations in their communities – the schools their kids go to, the places of worship they attend each week and community centers they know well.

These efforts are all paying off. The campaign reports that early voting turnout is huge in the swing states. I have friends here who have gone into Nevada to assist neighborhood volunteers with efforts to get out the vote. As a result, the Romney campaign has essentially conceded Nevada.

Here are some of the other results:

Among non-midterm voters, Democratic turnout is outpacing the Republicans’ turnout in every single battleground state with party registration.

• In Colorado, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina and Nevada, 1.4 million non-midterm Democrats have voted already, compared with just 840,000 non-midterm Republicans.
• And in Ohio, more than 179,000 non-midterm voters from counties Obama won in 2008 have cast ballots, compared with just 91,000 non-midterm voters from Republican-leaning counties. Ohio does not have party registration, so how a county voted in 2008 is one way to measure this turnout.

This isn't to say there aren't concerns. Florida's shortened early voting days are a problem, but OFA has focused on sporadic voters in Florida vis a vis the early vote. They are encouraging all voters to turn out on election day, and they're working the lines of people waiting to vote to make sure they don't get discouraged.

In North Carolina, some college students are being shifted to provisional votes because of weird redistricting causing the line to roll right through the middle of their campus.

In Ohio, a lawsuit has been filed over Jon Husted's newest dirty trick intended to disenfranchise legitimate voters.

In Florida, one polling place was shut down on Saturday because mysterious packages were left, causing the bomb squad to have to shut down the entire polling place to explode them.

These are problems, yes. But the campaign is undeterred, and they've built a foundation of thousands of community-based organizations to make sure people vote, and that their vote is counted.

I asked specifically in a different call about what they plan for issues that arise on election day in terms of disenfranchisement reports or other dirty tricks. My question arose from reports about Wisconsin and Iowa poll watchers trained by the Romney campaign who were trained incorrectly regarding ID requirements in those states. Whether by accident or design, it's an issue the campaign is aware of and has volunteers and lawyers ready to deal with.

Every national election has stories like this. But we live in an age of YouTube and real-time reporting via Twitter and Facebook, among others. That enables a rapid response and if the voters actually come and VOTE, this election will be as fair as one might expect.

In the course of this phone call, my neighborhood canvassers have wrapped up here and moved on to a different location. It was comforting to see them out and enthusiastic in this formerly red but turning purple district.

It changes one voter at a time.

This year's Election Day isn't only about Obama -- it's about all the down ticket races, too, and sending a brushback pitch to Republican extremists (who, God help us, make the Democratic party look almost liberal by comparison). Daily Kos is helping to organize a massive get out the vote operation in Pennsylvania with the Urban League's Occupy the Vote (as you can see from the above video, Republicans are doing their best to fix the election here by suppressing Democratic votes).

Pennsylvania needs your help to counteract the new Voter ID law, which is intended to keep Democrats away from the polls on Election Day. This is part of an organized effort across state legislatures, and it's infuriating.

You have a few options. You can 1) sit on your hands and complain about what the Republicans are doing, or you can 2) volunteer even a few hours of your time FROM THE COMFORT OF YOUR OWN HOME to make phone calls. If you are physically able and willing, you can also do canvassing, work voter registration tables, do data entry or give rides to the polls.

Click here if you can help even a little.

Despite the stipulation by both sides that voter fraud was not a problem in Pennsylvania, the judge hearing a challenge to the state's Voter ID law today upheld it in a 73-page opinion.

Basically, his ruling was this: It doesn't matter if there isn't a problem. Nothing precludes the legislature from making a law preventing one, even if such a problem doesn't exist and is unlikely to exist. Also, there are enough ways to satisfy the law that no one will be prevented from voting. Maybe.

It seemed to me that this judge hung his hat on the fact that provisional and absentee ballots could be cast without identification. My problem with that is that provisional ballots aren't always counted, and absentee ballots will still require a valid voter registration. How do homeless people vote? It also singles out voters for armies of lawyers to challenge.

Most galling of all, he acknowledged Mike Turzai's comments about fixing the election for a Romney win and then went on to discount them because he didn't make them while in legislative session and there was no evidence that other legislators were in the room. Really? At a Republican retreat? Really?

Voter ID laws are undemocratic. Period.

Here's one story of how a college student in North Carolina navigated a difficult system fraught with barriers:

That Saturday, I spent about two hours at the early voting site at the Graham, N.C., Public Library. I told the poll worker I needed a provisional ballot and was sent to the voter registration line. I completed another voter registration form and more than half an hour later I explained my situation, again, to another poll worker. I was sent to someone else and finally was able to cast a provisional ballot.

The process was draining and frustrating. The poll workers clearly were confused; one was obviously annoyed, even hostile. Several friends were with me, and we all talked about leaving.

My boyfriend was registered to vote in another North Carolina county, and showed his on-campus address by using his iPhone, but was told he needed a document. Several other friends from his building had similar problems, and they all had to step out of the long line. One woman applied for a library card, and then each student paid to use the printer.

Was her vote counted? Read the article to find out.

And still more undemocratic action in Florida, where Rick Scott promises a new voter roll purge before the November election, despite reservations of county election officials.

The Obama campaign is definitely fighting back legally and also with their GottaVote.org website. They've assembled resources on a state-by-state basis there with checklists for registration and other important resources. If you live in a VoterID state, please keep that site in mind for help with voter registration.

While I realize there isn't anything preventing Republicans from making laws that benefit them, the vote is the one thing in our democracy we have. It frustrates me that people don't vote in every election. Imagine the impact if our turnouts were 100 percent instead of the lousy 50-60 percent they usually are in a high-turnout election. Maybe we'd actually have a better and more perfect union.

In the down-ballot races, you find the real damage done to American government and culture when sane, rational people fail to vote. I can't think of a better example than the Texas State Board of Education. At Netroots Nation this year, I met two women, Judy Jennings and Rebecca Bell-Metereau, who aim to take that institution back this cycle. More after the jump...

EDIT: Video was corrected for spelling at 775 views and 29 downloads.

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If Republican Mo Brooks wins Tuesday's contest for Alabama's fifth Congressional district, it will be for two reasons: (1) retail politics (2) Glenn Beck. I found two men at the Republican headquarters in Lauderdale County last Thursday. One of them was kind enough to speak on camera. Thoughts on my interview with them, and the House race I reported on here eleven days ago, are below the fold.

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"Why I'm a tea partier"

Open thread below...

Al Franken, retelling the President's car in the ditch story with a bit more accuracy:

When the President took office, not only had the car gone into a ditch, the car had flipped over and was rolling down a steep embankment. We, the American people, were in the back seat, and the Bush Administration had removed all the seat belts, so we were all flying around the interior of this car as it was rolling and flipping and careening down this steep embankment, headed to a 2,000 foot cliff. And at the bottom of that cliff were jagged rocks. And alligators.

Now, at noon on January 20th, 2009, as the car was careening toward the cliff, George W. Bush jumped out of the car.

President Obama somehow managed to dive in through the window, take the wheel and get control of the thing just inches before it went over the precipice. Then, he and Congress starting pushing this wreck back up the embankment. Now you can’t push a car up an embankment as fast as it careens down the embankment, especially if some people are trying to push against you. But we got it going in the right direction. And slowly we’ve gotten ourselves up the embankment, out of the ditch and onto the shoulder of the road.

There. That’s what happened.

His point? This:

Well, they may have the powerful corporations on their side. But we’ve got you.

If I sound like a broken record, it's because I cannot bear the idea of Joe Lieberman as Senate power broker. So please, go vote.

Got Democratic (or at the very least, non-crazy) friends and family members who say they're not gonna vote this November because they're disappointed with Congress or Obama or something? Make 'em watch this.

I touch wood everytime I say or write that it now looks as nearly certain as it can be that Obama will be the next President of the United States. But, of course, Obama is correct that all the polling in the world is meaningless if people decide that they can stay home on Election Day because Obama is going to win anyway. So get out there.

And while you're at it, make sure you know your rights and be on the look out for vote supression tricks. The Obama campaign has a new video on the GOP's voter supression campaign - because the lower the vote the better it is for Republicans. They thrive in a climate of disenfranchisement.

Despite all their accusations, even the McCain campaign admit they can't make the voter fraud claim stick:

For weeks, Republican leaders have warned that widely reported problems with fake voter registrations could result in a flood of phony votes in pivotal states.

But Ronald Michaelson, a veteran election administrator and member of the McCain-Palin Honest and Open Election Committee, said in an interview that he could not name a single instance in which this had occurred.

“Do we have a documented instance of voting fraud that resulted from a phony registration form? No, I can’t cite one, chapter and verse,” he said.

Which makes their accusations a form of fraud in its own right, doesn't it? One that's been falsely used to fuel "Republicans’ invocation of legal power to scrutinize voters, demands for U.S. Justice Department intervention and court orders, and criminal investigations."

But make no mistake - if the Republican's can't steal the election through voter suppression and voting irregularities they'll use that failure as an excuse to accuse Democrats of stealing it. The McCain campaign and Republicans have already trotted out dozens of excuses but there's only one reason McCain will lose - Obama is the better man for the job.

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Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott's two year, $1.4 million dollar investigation into what he claims is "an epidemic of voter fraud in Texas" to justify his support for voter ID laws, resulted in just 26 cases. It will come as no surprise to anyone who has been following C&L's ongoing coverage of this issue that all of the cases were "against Democrats, and almost all involving blacks or Hispanics." What's more, of the 26, only 8 were actually cases of fraud. "In 18 of the 26 cases, the voters were eligible, votes were properly cast and no vote was changed – but the people who collected the ballots for mailing were prosecuted," yet Abbott refused to investigate a serious case of apparent ballot-box stuffing of "more than 100 ballots – potentially more than in all of Mr. Abbott's other vote-fraud prosecutions combined" - "in Highland Park, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the country with hundreds of million-dollar homes and where both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney once lived."

In more than 2/3 of the cases in Greg Abbott's epidemic, he actually charged volunteers who merely helped elderly and disabled people to be able to vote because they didn't add their name to the envelope to show that they carried the sealed envelope to a mailbox for them - a crime Abbott saw fit to spend an average of more than $53,000 each to pursue of a Federal Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Grant that is supposed to go to enforce state and local laws with an "emphasis on violent crime and serious offenders." Serious indeed.

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