Today’s comic by Jen Sorensen is Let's get real on Election Day:
• Forget to register to vote? That won’t matter in these states an the District of Columbia because you can register and vote today anyway: Colorado; Connecticut; Idaho; Illinois; Iowa; Maine; Minnesota; Montana; New Hampshire; Washington, DC; Wisconsin; Wyoming. No registration is required in North Dakota.
• The New York Times andThe Washington Post are switching off their paywalls for the day: The Financial Times is doing the same for their election stories. But not The Wall Street Journal. A Journal spokeswoman told Morning Media, "Our coverage of this historic election is a perfect example of the kind of trusted news, insight and analysis our members pay for." You would think that a business newspaper might know something about marketing strategies.
• Barack Obama now more popular than Ronald Reagan was in 1988.
• Early Voting reshaping U.S. election strategy:
The spread of early balloting is forging new habits that are forcing campaigns to rethink how they allocate their resources. And it tends to favor those campaigns that are more technologically sophisticated and can identify, draw out and measure its support over a longer voting period. [...]
The idea of a rolling election actually dates back to frontier times, when it would sometimes take days for people to reach their polling places. Then in 1845, Congress established one national Election Day. The reason, said Michael McDonald, an associate professor of political science at the University of Florida, should sound familiar: suspicion of fraud.
• David Leonhardt reminds voters to remember that many of our fellow citizens are disenfranchised: And notes that there are fixes:
Congress could set minimum standards for each state — requiring automatic voter registration, for example. I realize that most congressional Republicans now have little interest in voting rights. But I’d urge them to consider their party’s long-term interests: Opposing basic rights for large and growing groups is not so smart.
If Congress won’t act, the Supreme Court can. The court can acknowledge that its 2013 dismantling of a key part of the Voting Rights Act hinged on an overly rosy view of the aftermath. The Equal Protection Clause offers one solution, as the scholar Richard Hasen has argued: The justices could interpret it to overturn state laws making it harder to register and vote.
• On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Our 10/12 show explored WTF is up with Trump & all those beauty pageants and the modeling agency. SwedishJewfish’s "We All Knew About the Trafficking.” The Untold Story of Trump Model Management reminds you to vote once & flush twice today.
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