Voting, Swing State | featured news

Here's one more way swing states stand out: Their citizens are more likely to vote. That may not be surprising given, in this year's presidential campaign, the battleground states were deluged by TV ads and targeted for sophisticated get-out-the-vote operations. After all that, 10 key swing states had significantly higher turnout than the rest of the USA, an analysis of data by the non-partisan Center for the Study of the American Electorate shows.

Sporadic problems were reported Tuesday at polling places around the country, including a confrontation in Pennsylvania involving Republican inspectors over access to some polls and a last-minute court fight in Ohio over election software. One Florida elections office mistakenly told voters in robocalls the election was on Wednesday....

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted now stands accused of ordering for "experimental software patches" to be installed on the vote-counting machines in a number of Ohio counties. According to the Columbus Free press, voting rights activists are concerned that the software patches, which are usually utilized to update or change existing software, could possibly affect over 4 million registered voters, including those in the state's most populated counties near Cleveland and Columbus.

Just two days from the finish, President Barack Obama's campaign is mobilizing a massive get-out-the-vote effort, as Republican Mitt Romney makes a play for votes in Pennsylvania.

Will you cast your vote this fall on a faulty electronic machine that's partly owned by the Romney Family? Will that machine decide whether Romney will then inherit the White House? Through a closely held equity fund called Solamere, Mitt Romney and his wife, son and brother are major investors in an investment firm called H.I.G. Capital. H.I.G. in turn holds a majority share and three out of five board members in Hart Intercivic, a company that owns the notoriously faulty electronic voting machines that will count the ballots in swing state Ohio November 7. Hart machines will also be used elsewhere in the United States.

Meet Matt Reisetter, a weary and somewhat teed-off Iowa voter. A stay-at-home dad in his mid-30s, he has long since unplugged his two land lines to stop the nonstop calls from campaigns reminding him to vote. But that hasn’t blocked the three to four daily pieces of political mail.