The election numbers are in and the winner is….

America’s working families.

Even before the Nov. 4 results are tallied, the nearly year-long election mobilization throughout the union movement is a victory for the thousands of union volunteers who have dedicated their scarce free time in get-out-the-vote efforts. Without them, we could not have reached the millions of union members critical to reversing the misery of the Bush years.

In a comment earlier today Perris asked if I could post on this video: Here are my feelings on the issue in general: 1. It is really important to document these cases and HAVA (Help America Vote Act) definetly needs to be changed. 2. I do not believe that the 2004 election was stolen by bad voting machines — I think for a variety of reasons we got our butts kicked.

Court ruling, decisions by secretaries of state in Wisconsin, Ohio and Nevada blunt GOP’s anti-voter agenda.

If you thought that this presidential election was about the economy, think again. Senator John McCain’s campaign is flooding swing voters with “robocalls” putting to question Barack Obama’s character. North Carolina representative Robin Hayes at a recent rally accused Obama of “inciting class warfare”and said that “liberals hate real Americans that work and achieve and believe in God.”

The recent “balance” memo by Strib editor Nancy Barnes to her reporters on how they should cover the endgame of the 2008 election season is one more bit of confirmation that the StarTribune, the sad and pathetic hollowed-out remnant of two once-fine papers, is utterly cowed by, if not in the tank for, the Republican Party. She exhorts her staff: “If you are involved in a political story, please look at it from several different perspectives and ask yourself: ‘If I were running, would I find this fair and balanced?’” Notice that she doesn’t tell them to make sure their stories are true.

Long ago (think Nixon Southern strategy days) there was a fiendishly clever way to rob voters of their votes. It involved organizing a “voter registration drive” usually in a poor or minority areas. The drives’ promoters would collect voter registration applications from the citizens.

Then, they would throw them down some sewer….. .

ACORN has so far registered 1.3 million new voters, mostly Democrats, enough to scare any respectable pencil-squeezing Republican.  But the numbers involved remind me of the signatures that were collected to recall Gray Davis in California in 2003:

Supporters of the recall turned in 1.65 million signatures, about 1.36 million of which — about 82 percent — were deemed valid, according to figures released by the secretary of state’s office. 

That’s 300,000 signatures that couldn’t be verified.  Darryl Issa paid $1 per signature, or $1.65 million dollars to facilitate the recall.  It’s just what happens when you send people out onto the street and offer to pay them to get people to sign up — it’s factored in by reasonable business people as the “cost of doing business.” 

But conservatives rarely understand how things work.  They don’t take the time and don’t have the minds.  We’re thus treated to a lot of smoldering innuendo, a bunch of supposedly damning facts, but what they think the ultimate Acorn conspiracy is never really comes together into a concrete plan.

Inside the Obama campaign, almost without anyone noticing, an insurgent generation of organizers has built the Progressive movement a brand new and potentially durable people’s organization, in a dozen states, rooted at the neighborhood level.

Live From Main Street and GRITtv continue our week of special programming. Today, technology, voting machines, and the future of democracy. In November, one quarter of the country will be voting on paperless electronic voting machines. Yet, questions have emerged about partisan contractors programming the machines that will count the vote.

How are voters to know how to protect their precious right to vote?
AlterNet reporter Steven Rosenfeld to the rescue! He has produced a Handy Dandy little tome called “Count My Vote – A Citizen’s Guide to Voting.”
Steve spent a year looking at the barriers to voting and the strategies that have been successful in overcoming those barriers. He offers helpful and practical tips on how you, the voter, can protect your own right to vote.