Questions may be already being answered

Electoral-vote.com blog had some great nuggets on some of the major questions to be answered by Tuesday's election day.

The first deals with, well, early election days. With a record number of early voters in 31 states having already cast their ballots, questions are raised about who does early voting favor and how might the large number of early voters throw off tradition exit polls on Tuesday night:

"One problem with all this campaigning is that for many voters it is too late. According to the Early Voting Information Center early voting is going to break all records. For example, in North Carolina, 42% of all Democrats, 35% of all Republicans, and 30% of all independents have already voted. In Florida the numbers are 22%, 15%, and 20%, respectively."

CNN also has a story on early voting, with a map to all the early voting states and its results.

One complication caused by early voting is that the exit polls Tuesday will sample only 60-70% of the electorate and it may well be a biased sample given the fact that so many Democrats have voted early so Tuesday voters may be disproportionately Republicans.

Questions the election will answer

The LA Times has a story about four questions this election will answer:

1. Is America prepared to elect a black President?
2. Is the old red-blue culture war still going on?
3. Do Americans want a bigger government or a smaller government?
4. Has the demographic composition of the electorate fundamentally changed?

To this list, one might add:

1. Have the Republicans been changed from a national party to a regional party?
2. Has public financing of campaigns gone the way of the dodo?
3. Has the political power of the evangelicals waned?

Study shows virtually no evidence of voter fraud

The Republicans have been talking a lot about voter fraud, but yet another study shows that it barely exists. Politico has a story in which a reporter pressed Ronald Michaelson, a veteran election administrator who is now working for the McCain campaign, to cite a single documented case of voter fraud that resulted from a phony registration and he could not come up with even one example. When asked, another McCain official, Ben Porritt, came up with 13 articles. However, 11 of these did not involve registration fraud at all and only one involved a noncitizen voting. While there is no doubt that low-paid workers for ACORN and other groups have turned in false registrations to ACORN (to earn a bit more), the organization itself selects out the clearly bogus ones and puts these in a separate envelope before turning them in (as required by law). This is how the bogus registrations get in the news. However, documented cases of bogus registrations actually leading to illegal voting are virtually nonexistent as the fraud being committed is the low-paid workers defrauding ACORN itself of a bit of money, not actual voting fraud.

Let's have an Electoral College Pool

The Nov. 2 projection of http://www.electoral-vote.com/

predicts Obama will win the elctoral vote 353-185. This would make mandate-like numbers. The McCain camp says polls are tightening in battleground states. What do you think the electoral results will be on Tuesday. Blog your final projection, with one best bet of a battleground state. Also include your prediction of the overal popular vote. The closest to the final outcome in our pool will win a major award.