So I just got back from a McCain rally here in San Diego and aside from feeling dirty, he’s definitely a bit worried about California.  He brought out every gun he’s got, big, little, whatever.  He was introduced by Mayor Jerry Sanders, former CA SoS Bill Jones and Governor Schwarzenegger (McCain “will say ‘Hasta la vista’ to wasteful spending in Washington.”).  On stage but silent were locals such as my councilman Kevin Faulconer and County Supervisor Ron Roberts.  Along for the ride on the plane and the photo ops were wife Cindy, mother Roberta, and his murderers row of pseudo-moderates: Governor Crist from Florida and Senators Richard Burr, Lindsay Graham and Joe Lieberman.  They didn’t say anything but they stood there very moderately.

And then Senator McCain went ON AND ON about the evils of radical Islamic extremism (radical extremism? Is it also exceptionally unique? Largely big?).  He told people that it’s a titanic struggle against people who want to destroy everything and that there is nothing more evil than what we’re up against.  He gave “my friends” plenty of “straight talk” about…evil.  Troops aren’t coming home because that would be surrender (does that mean that we can’t win if the troops come home?).  He said that he was the only one who knew Rumsfeld’s plan would fail and the Petraeus plan was necessary (presumably not even Petraeus knew).  Spent about two seconds on making tax cuts permanent and saying that it’s bad when Congress spends money (just like the Constitution says. Oh wait…).  

Closed things off trying to roll around in the filth of the Reagan legacy and then noting that $35 billion in earmarks could have gone towards $1000 for every child in the country.  How much would the $2 trillion in Iraq money have translated into for the kids? McCain was mum on this point (the answer because I like math is…a whole lot more).

Point is, McCain is desperate to make everyone scared because he’s scared of Romney.  Rally in San Diego seven hours before the polls close to talk about fear? Hm.

(I wonder what we’ll be dealing with the rest of the week. bump. – promoted by Lucas O’Connor)

So I went to my polling place at an off-hour to see if turnout was decent (it was pretty average, in my view).  It was a new location for me, in a little art gallery featuring an exhibit called “Patriot Acts” (yes, a politically themed art installation in a polling place.  Ah, the People’s Republic of Santa Monica).  I had no problem getting my ballot and heading to the booth.  The guy behind me was a DTS voter who had no idea that Republicans didn’t allow them to vote in the primary.  “I wouldn’t vote for the Republicans anyway,” he yelled as he took a Democratic ballot.  But nobody told him to make sure to fill out that Democratic oval to re-assert that he, as a nonpartisan voter, requested a Democratic ballot (as if taking the ballot in the first place wasn’t enough of a clue).  So I told him.

My neighbor was headed to the polls; she’s also a DTS voter.  I told her to make sure to fill out that Democratic oval.  She said she kind of heard something about that but wasn’t sure.

I’ve received more than a couple emails from DTS voters thanking me for telling them about the issue, or saying that they didn’t fill out the bubble, asking me whether or not their votes will be counted.

This is a NIGHTMARE.  An absolute nightmare.  This has been in place since 2002, and somehow the evidence from 2004, when so few DTS voters participated in the Democratic primary in LA County, wasn’t enough to dummy-proof the system.  Thousands upon thousands of voters are going to be disenfranchised today.  I can’t reach them all; neither can the CDP.  The Secretary of State must demand that all those DTS ballots are impounded, the machines recalibrated to eliminate this problem, and all votes reread through the feeder.  In a race so close, we cannot have this crisis of confidence.

UPDATE: I’m on a conference call with the Obama campaign right now and they’re talking about this very issue.  “There is great concern” in Los Angeles County, and “the pollworkers are confused” about this as well, according to the lawyer on the phone now (I would use the word “ignorant” and not confused).  “We’re hoping the Secretary of State and the County Registrar will rectify this situation” but they don’t sound particularly hopeful.

DTS voters are also being denied ballots in selected counties, according to the campaign.

Carla Marinucci is wondering why this wasn’t challenged previously.  This has been in place in LA County in multiple election cycles, and knowing that DTS voters would show up in record numbers, I agree that it should have been caught earlier.  My point is that the Secretary of State’s office or the county registrar should have been the ones to catch it.  The lawyer just said “We hope that they will adopt procedures to make sure these ballots are counted,” and if they aren’t adopted, he raised the option of legal challenges.

These ballots almost certainly won’t be counted tonight, and keep that in mind when you start seeing the results roll in.

They’re hoping that the media gets this out.  I’m trying.

UPDATE II: From Ezra Klein:

From the inbox: This is really weird. From the Clinton campaign:

4:25 PM EST HILLARY WIRE UPDATE…

* False reports about voting problems in LA are being drudged up

– Everything is going smoothly in LA.

What a revolting statement (if true).

Update (Lucas): LA City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo has a statement out now.

“I urge the Secretary of State and County Registrar to do everything within their power to ensure that every vote is counted, and to carefully weigh voter intent against this confusing Los Angeles County ballot design.

(because she really has been a strong defender of the voters here in California. – promoted by shayera)

In 2000 and in 2004, we saw what happened when election results are called into question. Citizens across the country reacted with outrage when they realized that their vote might not be counted. That’s why, in 2006, California Democrats worked to elect Secretary of State Debra Bowen — she promised to make sure that in our state, every vote would be protected.  

Bowen has fulfilled that campaign promise. Last year she had experts at the University of California conduct a thorough analysis of California’s electronic voting machines. When that review showed the machines could be hacked and results could be changed, Bowen promptly decertified the machines to maintain the integrity of California elections.

So how did Diebold and Sequoia respond to her actions? As you might expect, by putting their PR departments into overdrive. In the days and weeks leading up to today’s election, they have waged a media campaign to blame Debra Bowen for election delays, cost overruns, and teen acne.

And it’s worked. Newspapers and TV reporters up and down the state have been repeating their breathless assertions that today’s election results will be needlessly delayed because perfectly good voting equipment is not being used, with dire predictions that the winner might not be known for days.

Just last week, the SF Chronicle published an article predicting long delays in today’s vote tally.

“We’re estimating that it’s going to be 6 a.m. Wednesday before we get all the precinct votes counted,” said Elma Rosas, a spokeswoman for the Santa Clara County registrar of voters. “Our goal is to have 90 percent of the votes counted by Friday afternoon.”

That’s not good news for politicians and pundits who will be anxiously waiting to see who wins the presidential primaries in the nation’s largest state, which has 58 counties. If Santa Clara County’s problems are replicated in the other counties that are being forced to use new voting systems, final vote counts could be a long time coming.

Most of the problems stem from Secretary of State Debra Bowen’s decision in August to virtually bar the use of most electronic voting machines after a controversial state-sponsored review found that the systems were vulnerable to hackers and might not accurately tally votes.

Right.  Those delays wouldn’t possibly have anything to do with the fact that, according to today’s Field Poll, 4.1 million Californians are expected to cast absentee ballots, with most of them arriving at RoV’s offices in the last few days.

Nevertheless, on the very same day as the SF Chronicle published the article cited above, the LA Times piled on, not only predicting long delays but then publishing personal attacks by local elected officials that were aimed at Bowen:

“This was a shoot-from-the hip political maneuver to help her gain name recognition,” said Riverside County Supervisor Jeff Stone. “This is purely a waste of taxpayer money.”

To drive home the point, the LA times quoted the acting Orange County Registrar of Voters, Neal Kelly, who claimed that “There are a lot of grassy-knoll theories going on. Some of these people are on the fringe and will never be satisfied.”

It’s not hard to figure out that Diebold and Sequoia have had their spokesmen out in force influencing that media narrative. Now Debra Bowen needs ordinary California citizens to spread the word on her behalf, to tell the world that we are willing wait a little longer to get our election results if we know that it means our vote has been counted correctly.

So if you believe that we should take the time to count every vote as cast, you need to Stand up for Debra Bowen.

If you believe that we deserve to have confidence in how our elections are conducted, you need to Stand up for Debra Bowen today.

Stand up today and fight for your right to know that your vote is safe and secure.

Here’s how you can help. Write a letter to the editor of your newspaper explaining why you support Debra Bowen and her commitment to election integrity. The California Democratic Party has set up a web page that makes it easy to write letters to the editor on this topic.  Just click on this link or go to www.cadem.org/standup. We have sample letters, talking points, and some pointers to help you get started.

Debra Bowen has been standing up for us since 2006.  Today it’s our turn to Stand up for Debra Bowen.  Take a minute right now to show your support.

Penny

Online Organizing Director

California Democratic Party

As for election news in California, the final two polls have been wildly divergent.  SurveyUSA shows a 10-point Clinton lead, while Reuters/Zogby has a 13-point Obama lead.  The final Field Poll (the gold standard, as everyone knows) went with a one-point lead to Obama two-point lead to Clinton, almost exactly in the middle.

Of course, this only tells part of the story, as Marc Ambinder picked up on my caveat that the district-level delegate system will skew the results, particularly in those even-numbered districts, where a high bar is needed to be scaled to get anything beyond an even split of delegates.  And if you expect an early answer about them, think again:

So much for having a hard delegate count on Super Tuesday, we’re hearing that CA Dems won’t have final delegate tally ready until Friday.

Debra Bowen’s mantra has been that she’d rather get the count right than get it fast, so everyone’s going to have to wait.  I think it’s a small price to pay for voting with a paper ballot.  By the way, DTS voters, fill that bubble!

The Cook Political Report did the same district-level analysis that I did yesterday, and found a considerably larger amount of variance.  Cook thinks that Clinton can get over the 63% bar in those heavily-Latino districts (I’m not so sure).  I understand that the 6-delegate seats require 58.3% of the vote to get a 4-2 split, which seems to me to be possible in Barbara Lee’s CA-09 and Nancy Pelosi’s CA-08, so Obama could be in an even stronger position than I thought.  And as Councilman Garcetti said last night, they are paying attention to this stuff, on both sides I would imagine.

Finally, we have somewhat neglected the Republican race.  The chic pick is that Romney has come all the way back and will take California.  John McCain is apparently worried about it, since it would mean that Romney has an argument to stay in the race.  Both candidates scurried back here today for extra bits of campaigning.

And yet McCain’s people fear he may lose the popular vote in California to Romney — even if they haul in the same number of CA delegates — and that the Super Tuesday story will therefore NOT be the crowning of McCain but rather his failure to put away the game, a failure born of his fractious and sometimes unloving relationship with conservatives, especially those millions of conservatives who listen to and abide by Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, not to mention Limbaugh and Hannity themselves, and a failure that in turn will be viewed as both a symptom and a cause of the historic crack-up of the conservative coalition that has sustained and nourished the Republican Party for a couple generations.

Which would be fantastic, since it would be desirable for their race to be as screwed up as ours.  Could the relentless Rush Limbaugh attacks be having an impact?  We’ll soon find out.

UPDATE: Harold Meyerson has further thoughts, and they’re good.