Getting Down To It

We did it. Me and a few hundred other voters made it through the chaos of our local polling place this morning around 9 a.m. The 80-year-old gatekeepers were no match for swarms of seasoned neighborhood voters. The only electioneering I saw outside was a lone Green Party member handing out flyers. Otherwise, one voting machine broke down (from what I saw, only one), which raises the number I heard on WNYC of broken machines this morning from "a couple" to at least three.

I have actual pangs in my stomach today. I wish I could be as assured as Jimmy Breslin, who writes today that he is "so sure [that Kerry will win] that I am not even going to bother to watch the results tonight. I am going to bed early, for I must rise in the darkness and pursue immediately an exciting, overdue project."

[Grand.]

He also has this point:
"Not one cell phone in the United States had been reached by a political poll. These old-line poll takers don't know who cell phone users were or where they lived.

So you were getting CBS/New York Times polls proclaimed as most important and real. One hundred seventy million cell phones and you don't poll one of them. The polls they are pushing at you in the news magazines, on the networks, in the big papers, are such cheap, meaningless blatant lies, that some of these television stations should have their licenses challenged."


[Ach, we'll see soon enough.]


A friend sent me this, just so everybody knows what's happening as things get under way:

Posted on Tue, Nov. 02, 2004

Paper denied access at polls

Judge won't block order banning media despite years of open admittance

By Julie Wallace
Beacon Journal staff writer

CLEVELAND - A federal judge on Monday refused to allow the Akron Beacon Journal access to polling locations -- a practice the paper has enjoyed for years in its news-gathering role.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Paul Matia late Monday effectively cut off the right of all media, not just the newspaper, to monitor voting during what is expected to be the most divisive Election Day in recent history.

The newspaper's attorneys said an appeal to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals was to be filed no later than this morning.