[Image via stock.xchng.]

Perhaps in honor of "Sexual Assault Awareness Month," anonymous Columbus activists have launched a vigilante-style public awareness campaign, in which they mark the locations of sexual assaults on the Ohio State campus with the stenciled words, "someone was raped here." On their website, the group Feminist Avengers (which denies responsibility for the graffiti) explains, "People have long used physical markers to remember tragedies past, from crosses and flowers at the intersection of a tragic car crash, to memorials at sites of disasters and violent crimes."

Although the website (seemingly sympathetic to the shadow organization) explains that the artists were at pains to stencil the words only in those locations where multiple rapes were reported - so as to protect the privacy of individual victims - the campaign has started a heated debate. While some have applauded the actions and the awareness of sexual assault - on the rise in Columbus - that it promotes, others say the images trigger memories of their assaults and increase their senses of menace. Writes one commenter, "The woman/ women who were attacked in that location have the right to handle what happened to them in their own way...It's the impact that matters, not the intent. Adding to someone's trauma to make a statement doesn't strike me as being remotely supportive or helpful."

As the city's Other Paper summarizes the controversy,

The local debate exemplifies a larger, nationwide debate surrounding radical feminist organizations-who has the right to speak on behalf of the women/survivors in question? Do jarring images promote awareness of sexual assault, or merely reinforce fears and existing stereotypes surrounding sexual assault? And should activists censor shock-campaigns to protect survivors emotionally, or do bold guerilla-style actions empower survivors?

It also brings up the question of the efficacy of guerrilla art as a tactic in the digital age. The last few months have seen several instances of feminist street art, from the absurdist performance art pieces of the British Muffia group, to Berlin's "feminist vandals" to the inscrutable commentary of France's street artist "Princess Hijab." While no one questions the importance of multimedia in maintaining the vibrancy of this or any other movement, the concern, as ever, is that such actions serve to dilute and sensationalize without providing concrete support. In the heyday of protest art, after all, such jarring tactics as those on the Ohio campus served as a wake-up call to societies genuinely sweeping important issues under the rug. But in a time when actual crisis and counseling centers exist only a few blocks away, as in the case of the Columbus graffiti, can feminists justify actions whose impacts might be problematic to actual survivors?

The artists would likely rebut that, in a time when such resources are indeed available, we run the risk of becoming complacent, treating rape as something manageable when by its definition it's not - and allowing an increased awareness of resources lower our guard to its dangers. The question is, will the benefits - the raised awareness, the sense of support for victims - outweigh the negative consequences? The sad truth is, any such action is unlikely to prevent someone disturbed from actually raping. But if it prompts campus safety or further awareness? Good. It also seems important not to treat all victims of assault as a faceless group who cannot be subjected to any reminders, because the horrible reality is that such reminders are everywhere, people deal with things in different ways, and the mixed response from survivors should serve to show, if nothing else, that this is not a monolithic population.

Feminist Avengers [Official Site]
Someone Was Raped Here [Other Paper]

Earlier: Have Merkin, Will Protest
"Feminist" Vandal Defaces Berlin
Princess Hijab

• A new study has found that exposure to family violence, even at a young age, can cause poor health among older African-American women. • Brittany Mayes, one of the five teens involved in the video-taped assault of a 16-year-old friend and fellow cheerleader, has been sentenced to a year of probation. • Click here to read an interesting interview with writer/filmmaker/actress/artist/musician Miranda July in which she discusses Gossip Girl, her new movie, New York hotels and internet gossip. • Forgetful? Fan of Memento? Buy a To-Do Tattoo Kit. • Chicago's Cook County sheriff's department is suing Craigslist for the many, many sex ads listed in its "casual encounters" section. • An Australian company is selling paper made out of wombat poop for the extremely environmentally conscious/cute-loving among us. • Baby bottle companies have agreed to stop using BPA, a potentially harmful chemical, in their plastic bottles. • 65-year-old Val Renfro was shopping when a man shoved her, grabbed her purse and ran. She grabbed her phone out of her bra, where she always keeps it, dialed 911, and chased down her thief with her car. • What a nightmare: Jean Driscoll, 72, has been burping uncontrollably for two years, and doctors still do not know what is wrong with her. • 70% of male drug addicts admit to taking drugs in order to increase sexual pleasure, the most popular choice being, somewhat surprisingly, cocaine (58%). Only 37% of drug-addicted women report using for this purpose. • A new study shows that older adults are better at controlling their emotions than young adults. Yet another reason to respect your elders. • Prostitute-rating website, The Erotic Review, has severed its ties with founder David Elms because of recent drug charges. • A Tehran court has ruled in favor of blinding the man who attacked Ameneh Bahrami with acid in 2004. Bahrami was left blind in both eyes, but the court ruled that, since her attacker is male and thus his eyes are worth more, he will only be blinded in one. • Using the model of a "pendulum of pain," counselor Steven Stosny explains to CNN why some women are unable to leave their abusers. • Get ready to get stabby: a defense lawyer in a Bahrain gang rape trial has argued that the three men who committed the crime should be acquitted because they only did it for "fun." • A 40-year-old British woman bit off her boyfriend's tongue during a drunken kiss because she was upset she was not pregnant. • Census data shows that minority children may become the majority by 2023. • A recent study found that watching violent cartoons may cause children to act out aggressively against their peers. • Amnesty International has issued a warning about gender-specific violence against women in Iraq. • Sad news: Anne-Marie Rogers, campaigner for breast cancer drug accessibility, has passed away. • In response to recent claims of mishandling rape cases, the University of Portland has changed its handbook with regards to rape victims and underage drinking. • Bed, Bath, and Beyond is sponsoring a contest for female (and only female) inventors to develop new products that will retail in stores. • Ohio has been named the "manliest" state in the country, based on stereotypical criteria such as the popularity of sports teams, tools, hardware, and the frequency of monster truck rallies. •

• If you weren't already aware, voter turnout is really high. That's led to some scattered problems, which will be chronicled after the jump. [Washington Post]
• In the mean time, the fucking Supreme Court heard the fucking case about fucking swearing on fucking TV. They didn't say "fuck" once, so I felt like someone had to. [Washington Post]
• A lot of people in California who really love each other rushed to get married today in case a bunch of small-minded, easily-led voters decide to make it illegal today for them to do so tomorrow. [NY Times]
• Joe Lieberman "fears" for the future of this country if the Democrats gain a filibuster-proof majority today, and has vowed to join with Republicans to filibuster anything they want to show his contempt for his constituents and the Americans who decided they were okay with a Democratic Senate. [Think Progress]

• Actor Tim Robbins was the most prominent victim of the ironically-named Help America Vote Act's mandated purges of voter rolls today. Being rather well-informed, he took his ass to court to force the city of New York to allow him to vote in the regular fashion, rather than provisionally since it would have gotten discarded. Can we just agree HAVA needs to be revisited next year? [NY Times]
• Rudy and Judith Nathan Giuliani apparent had no such difficulties and even got to cut in line. [Village Voice]
• Some people in Detroit waited 4-5 hours to vote. [CNN]
• Ditto in St. Louis. [CNN]
• A bunch of people in New Mexico that requested absentee ballots never got them and were told to show up and cast provisional ballots, as though if one needed to vote absentee that was a possibility. [CNN]
• At one Florida voting site, they had one machine to accommodate all the voters. Yeah, it was in a predominately African-American neighborhood. [Huffington Post]
• There were big problems with broken machines and a lack of paper ballots in Richmond, Virginia today, too. [Huffington Post]
• In Indiana, the GOP violated a judges orders and tried to challenge the voting status of foreclosed-upon voters. [Huffington Post]
• Some voters in Ohio were forced to cast provisional ballots (which might or might not be counted) because poll workers screwed up and thought that the address on the license had to match the address on the registration. It doesn't. [CNN]
• A 92-year-old woman in Texas cast her ballot from an ambulance outside the polling place when her absentee ballot didn't arrive. [CBS]
• Joe the Motherfucking Plumber went to the wrong polling place and tried to good ol' "Do you know who I am?" when he got stopped for speeding this week. Fuck. Off. Dude. [Wonkette]
• Joining JTMP in fucking off should be P.U.M.A. co-founder Will Bower. [CNN]
• Not that she swears, but 114-year-old Gertrude Baines, the daughter of former slaves who voted for Obama today, probably shares that sentiment. [LA Times]

The Ohio GOP would like to make Brunner no less than their version of Florida's former Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, who presided over the recount (and a record voter purge) in 2000 that left her state's citizens disillusioned about the electoral process. Republicans have already taken Brunner to the Supreme Court and back over an order than allows newly registered voters to participate in early voting — making it harder for GOP operatives to challenge their registrations. Brunner takes it all with a sense of equanimity, telling Seyward Darby, "But this too shall pass," despite the hate mail, death threats and fake-anthrax mailing she received in the wake of the Supreme Court decision that the registrations would stand. She and her staff and trying desperately to make sure that the election goes off with as few hitches as possible, and are leaving open the state's voter information hotline despite calls from in and out of state that have more to do with the already-decided court cases than helping individual voters exercise their rights.

A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall [The New Republic]

Related: Jennifer Brunner [JFK Library Foundation]

Colorado
After reports surfaced that Republican Secretary of State Mike Coffman had purged tens of thousands of voters from the rolls in Colorado within the sacrosanct 90-day time period in which purges are illegal, he was sued to add the voters back in. This week, a federal court forced Coffman to not only add those voters back onto the rolls, but to grant their provisional ballots special status. When one of the purged voters files a ballot, the state has to actively prove that they don't qualify to vote or else count the ballot.

Florida
The grandmother of voter suppression efforts by the GOP, early voters are turning out in record numbers here, too, hoping to avoid a repeat of the 2000 election. Most of them say they're hoping that if their votes get screwed up, voting early will give them time to fix things. Of course, machine breakdowns and ID-verification ended up slowing the process down, which means that early voters have hurried up to stand in line anyway. Despite GOP concerns that early voting could cost them the election, Republican Governor Charlie Crist ordered early voting locations to stay open longer to accommodate the unexpected surge.

Georgia
In a state seeing unprecedented voter turnout, particularly in African-American communities, and with scores of people voting early (as much as 40 percent of the total 2004 turnout), it's worth nothing that the Republican Secretary of State, Karen Handel, "flagged" as many as 55,000 Georgia voters for additional review prior to the election. While the courts told her to notify the 4,500 flagged for citizenship review that they were eligible to vote, there's no word on the other 50,000 people she's trying to kick off.

Michigan
Michigan has a system that sends newly registered voters cards to confirm their registration. Since 2006, about 5,000 of those cards were returned as undeliverable, and the state threw those voters off the rolls with no other evidence. This week, a federal appeals court ordered the state to re-enroll those voters, insisting that the state law does not require the receipt of the notification card, so the state can't declare them not registered. Those (and other voters) can still face a request for proof of residency at the polls.

Ohio
Ohio, the biggest, swingiest state of them all, has also been a hotbed of voter purges, new registration and Republican activity this year. As mentioned before, Ohio Republicans attempted to force Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner to throw people off the rolls and stop allowing voters who registered after the early voting period had started to vote; Brunner declined and the Supreme Court sided with her. Bush even tried to get the Department of Justice to weigh in on it, but AG Michael Mukasey decided he didn't want to end up a Gonzales-style legal outcast and declined. Nonetheless,most observers expect that Ohio will be the biggest clusterfuck of this election season (possibly even surpassing Florida in 2000), full of legal challenges, fraud allegations, suppression allegations and general stupid political shit that has nothing to do with anything. Should be fun.

Pennsylvania
The state of Pennsylvania went to court to argue that it didn't need to provide voters with paper ballots — despite all this talk of record turn-out — unless all of the machines in a polling place fail. Judge Harvey Bartle ruled that if half of the machines in a polling place break, the state has to provide paper ballots to voters. The state decided against appealing the decision, apparently realizing that forcing voters to stand in long lines to all use one functioning machine is probably not the best plan.

Virginia
The Virginia NAACP filed a lawsuit against Democratic Governor Tim Kaine this week, alleging that the state was failing to provide enough voting machines at minority voting places and asking the judge to force them to try to keep wait times to 45 minutes. They withdrew their request for a temporary injunction yesterday after negotiations with Kaine's administration, but the lawsuit remains active. People trying to take advantage of in-person absentee voting in Northern Virginia locations like Arlington have had to wait as long as 90 minutes this week. Worse yet, an anonymous group has been distributing flyers in Democratic precincts intended to convince voters that the day for Democrats to vote in November 5th.

West Virginia
After numerous complaints from voters that touch screens were flipping their votes for McCain, Jeff Waybright, the Jackson County clerk, attempted to explain away the errors and improperly calibrated machines. He demonstrated how it might look that way when a machine was improperly calibrated, and then calibrated the machine. It promptly failed to do what it was supposed to. So, if you live in West Virginia, review your votes carefully and take your paper record.

Voter Registration Smashes Records [MSNBC]
Concern Mounts Over Expected Voting Surge [CBS]
Some Voters Still Waiting On Absentee Ballots [CNN]
Colorado Agrees to Restore Voters to Rolls [NY Times]
How Early Voting Could Cost McCain Florida [Time]
Gov. Crist Extends Early Voting Hours statewide [Miami Herald]
Black Voters May Lead Democratic Wave [Salon]
Thousands Of Flagged Voters Can Vote, Court Rules [CNN]
Michigan Loses Appeal Over Voters Rolls [MSNBC]
Ain't Like the Old Days [Talking Points Memo]
In Tight Race, Victor May Be Ohio Lawyers [NY Times]
Judge: PA Must Have Paper Ballots Ready If Half Of Machines Fail [CNN]
Va. NAACP Sues Virginia Governor Over Election Readiness [AP]
NAACP Drops Voting Lawsuit [Richmond Times-Dispatch]
Delays Abound in Early-Voting Surge; Predictions of High Turnout, Confusion [Wall Street Journal]
Phony Board Of Elections Flier Tells Virginia Democrats To Tote On November 5 [Think Progress]
West Virginia Vote Flipping Allegedly Caught On Tape [Huffington Post]

Earlier: There's Nothing Some Fear More Than Citizens Exercising Their Constitutional Rights
Voter Suppression And You: A Guide For Unreal Americans

MEGAN: For a campaign that attempted to accuse everyone and anyone of sexism in regards to Sarah Palin, there's some sort of irony in campaign staff now calling her a "diva", I think. Also, I love the back-stabbing of the end of a campaign because it just shows you who is in it for the candidate and who's only in it for what the candidate winning can do for his/her career. And, yes, I'm looking at all the lobbyists in the McCain campaign.

LATOYA: I just feel like it's karma — you asked for a maverick, didn't you? Well now, she's just gone maverick on the trail. I watched McCain on Meet the Press on Sunday, he still says he's proud of her.

MEGAN: Not that her remarks this weekend were "the remarks [they] sent to the plane [that] morning."

LATOYA: I'm loving how some polls are calling Palin "a bigger drag on the campaign than Bush" — that's cold. Yet, there seems to be a strong push for Palin in 2012. (OMG, I am sleepy — I keep typing Plain when I mean Palin. Is my subconscious trying to tell me something?)

MEGAN: Apparently because she can deliver the xenophobes and the racists.

LATOYA: And the VPILF set.

MEGAN: Then Stephanie Herseth for VP in 2012!

LATOYA: Don't forget them. I was watching D.L. Hughley's comedy show on CNN on Saturday and Palin supporters were obviously playing bingo with the campaign buzzwords. "Maverick." "Real American." "Hot"

MEGAN: Palin supporters are the most boring people ever, like, how do you not just make that a drinking game?

LATOYA: See, I was thinking scrabble myself. I know I could hit a couple triple word scores with "RealAmerican", hit "maverick" with the M... I was amused at Hughley's sketch though — he kept telling the supporters that Palin needs a black guy to win, and handed out Palin/Hughley 2012 signs.

MEGAN: The only board game I am really good at is Trivial Pursuit, and even that I haven't played in years.

LATOYA: Response from the one guy — "We don't know you!" (Doesn't that sound familiar?)

Response from an angry woman: "Are you for abortion?"
DL: "I would never have one."

MEGAN: Maybe they're just worried that all black people aren't really Americans.

LATOYA: Neither are you latte-sipping coasters.

MEGAN: Screw lattes, it's all about the café au laits for me.

LATOYA: I think we need to start a campaign for fake America. American Faux. We need a tee shirt.

MEGAN: What would be our symbol? Lattes, arugula and diversity?

LATOYA: Oh, we should make a crest! "In cosmopolitia, we trust."

MEGAN: Do we still have to use the eagle? Could we go with the turkey like Ben Franklin, the ultimate latte-sipper if there ever was one? And then like in those old grade school drawings where you make it from an outline of your hang, we could put a different symbol for our cause on every feather!

LATOYA: See, this is shaping up nicely. I vote for Ben Franklin, Crispus Attucks, and Phyllis Wheatley as our symbols of American Faux. Though I think the first tee we make should be telling K. Rove to sit his ass down somewhere and stop being Captain Obvious. I thought he was a strategist. Who changed the job description?

MEGAN: A strategist is something even other Republicans think McCain lacks. Rove's a pundit now and so like Bill Kristol he has to walk that fine line between a level of intellectual honesty that can leave his job intact and party loyalty, so that's about all he can say. At least David Frum had some helpful suggestions, even if they were basically to let McCain continue to run his campaign into the ground on his own and start fighting to keep some Republicans in office.

LATOYA: Yeah, well it looks like they switched strategies — maybe they are hoping that they can just stop people from voting outright. Or that the election boards will do their work for them:

Berry is one of more than 50,000 registered Georgia voters who have been "flagged" because of a computer mismatch in their personal identification information. At least 4,500 of those people are having their citizenship questioned and the burden is on them to prove eligibility to vote. Experts say lists of people with mismatches are often systematically cut, or "purged," from voter rolls.

It's a scenario that's being repeated all across the country, with cases like Berry's raising fears of potential vote suppression in crucial swing states. "What most people don't know is that every year, elections officials strike millions of names from the voter rolls using processes that are secret, prone to error and vulnerable to manipulation," said Wendy Weiser, an elections expert with New York University's Brennan Center for Justice. "That means that lots and lots of eligible voters could get knocked off the voter rolls without any notice and, in many cases, without any opportunity to correct it before Election Day." Weiser acknowledged that "purging done well and with proper accountability" is necessary to remove people who have died or moved out of state. "But the problem is it's not necessary to do inaccurate purges that catch up thousands of eligible voters without any notice or any opportunity to fix it before Election Day and really without any public scrutiny at all," she said. Such allegations have flared up across the United States during this election cycle, most notably in Ohio, where a recent lawsuit has already gone to the U.S. Supreme Court.

MEGAN: I love how even Scalia was like, oh, Christ, fuck off, Ohio Republicans.

LATOYA: I feel like I need to call the election board and make sure I'm on the guest list. I didn't know voting was like clubbing — "I swear I'm on the list! I registered on Thursday! Can I please get my free drink ticket?"

MEGAN: Well, even if they purged you, they have to let you cast a provisional ballot.

LATOYA: Yeah, like someone is going to count those. And those ballots are shady anyway.

MEGAN: Well, I mean, that is the issue. I think, though, if they have purged so many people that the provisionals could make a difference, Obama's lawyers will probably have your back. I saw Recall. God, I love that movie.

LATOYA: One would hope. In good news, it seems that a lot of former felons have been re-enfranchised.

According to advocacy groups, about 5.3 million Americans, or 1 in 41 adults, have lost their right to vote because of a felony conviction.

"The issue here is really if someone should have a permanent scarlet letter on them — if there are certain offenses for which there is no redemption," said Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen, who played a lead role in revising Tennessee's voting law in 2006.

The suffrage laws vary by state and often by felony, with violent crimes incurring greater restrictions. Only two states — Maine and Vermont — permit voting by all felons, including those still in prison. California, along with states such as New York and Colorado, automatically reinstates voting rights to felons once they are released from prison and are off parole.

MEGAN: I think that if you've served your time, you've served your time, you shouldn't have to re-apply for citizenship. But people on probation and parole aren't done repaying their debt to society.

LATOYA: But unfortunately, we're still hating on Native Americans. And, um, Ohio voters.

MEGAN: I mean, there are reliable voting blocs that go Democratic, right? Why does the GOP not try to systematically disenfranchise groups of white people? Why is it always people of color?
Why do they hate your freedom?

LATOYA: Because, obviously, I'm not a real American. Therefore, it is obvious that I should only have fake rights and fake freedoms.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Greg Palast start off their Rolling Stone piece with the election supervisor of Las Vegas, NM who — like 1 in 9 Democrats — was thrown off the election rolls in his and was forced to cast a provisional ballot, half of which were later discarded. That's right, the state is throwing its own elected officials off the rolls due in no small part to the completely unironically-named Help America Vote Act of 2002. An example of its usefulness?

Since 2003, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, at least 2.7 million new voters have had their applications to register rejected. In addition, at least 1.6 million votes were never counted in the 2004 election — and the commission's own data suggests that the real number could be twice as high.

Don't you feel helped? If you don't, amusingly, you can blame convicted bribe-taking Republican (former) Congressman Bob Ney and Republican superlobbyist Jack Abramoff; the former co-authored the bill and the latter "worked to cram the bill with favors for his clients," for a law that "Republican election officials at the local and state level have used... to give GOP candidates an edge on Election Day by creating new barriers to registration, purging legitimate names from voter rolls, challenging voters at the polls and discarding valid ballots." The law which was sold to the American public as a way to help prevent another Florida actually forces states to implement many of Florida's voter match purge programs and the statewide voter registry that enabled Katherine Harris to conduct said purges. Kennedy and Palast identify 6 key things to GOP is doing to keep voters away from the polls: discouraging or disallowing voter registration drives (remember ACORN?); creating electronic matching systems and rules that typos disqualify potential new voters; purging voter rolls of veteran voters; requiring voters to show government-issued identification; requiring states to use touch screen computers without requiring paper trails; and challenging voters and provisional ballots to get them thrown out. Oh, it's going to be a fun election day.

Sasha Abramsky at Mother Jones takes a look at those issues, as well as some GOP tactics that can't claim the veneer of HAVA-sponsored legitimacy. In addition to the tactics outlined by the Kennedy and Palast, Abramsky notes that disallowing those with a felony record to vote disenfranchises as many as 1 out of 8 African-American men who have, technically, paid their debts to society. In addition, in 2004, at least one sheriff in North Carolina tried to initiate immigration violation investigations of voters in his county with Hispanic-sounding names, while Kentucky Republicans sent armed, white poll monitors to minority polling stations to prevent violence by standing around with guns visible. In 2004 and 2006, robocalls and flyers went out to people trying to convince them to vote in different polling places or on different days in order to reduce Democratic turnout and experts expect that similar misinformation will be posted online through spoof sites or by hacking official sites (an alarm also sounded by Wired). Sound unlikely? Talk to Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, who in addition to defending in court her decision to allow new registrants to take advantage of their early voting rights, has already had one hacker attempt to deface her website.

If all that doesn't scare you enough, Katrina Vanden Heuvel at The Nation checks in on some other GOP tactics, like the last-minute challenge of 6,000 voter registrations in Montana, the Virginia Board of Election's misleading residency questionnaire for students and local boards throwing out student registrations and telling students they'll risk their scholarship by being honest about where they spent 8 months of the year (which, notably, requires any working students to pay taxes as full time Virginia residents regardless of their "official address"), and the 9,000 remaining voter registrations that Florida's system of perfect-matching have rejected. Vanden Heuvel's one bright spot is the aforementioned Brunner's efforts in Ohio to fend off the many, many GOP challenges to new voters and early voting. Of course, the GOP is continuing to fight the case despite the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling against them, and is calling on its elected prosecutors in various counties to investigate every new voter who voted to determine whether they committed fraud or might yet do so.

And if that's still not enough for you, reports are rolling in from West Virginia and Ohio that the worst boogeyman of all has reared its ugly head — many voters are watching their electronic voting machines switch their votes to all Republicans.

So what can you do? Here's a list of things to try to make sure your vote is counted:

1. Vote early, preferably in person. Most of the people who will be out and about to mount challenges will be doing this on Election Day proper. This also gives you a chance to makes sure you are registered properly and challenge back if anything is wrong.
2. Insist on a paper trail. Many states have this as an option now, but in some it's only upon request. Request.
3. Don't wear anything that signals your voting preferences. Some states have little-used laws that prevent "electioneering" in polling places, and there have been signals that the folks there to challenge some voters will be challenging people wearing Obama stuff. Leave it at home or in your car.
4. Bring picture ID. Your state may or may not require that you have it, but it is one good way to verify your identity and residency if challenged. If your address isn't up-to-date, many states can issue free temporary change-of-address cards, or just do the paperwork to get it officially changed today.
5. Stand your ground, politely. The point of a challenge is to keep you from voting, and they can win in two ways. The easiest thing to do — which is why they're doing it — is to embarrass you into leaving. Fuck that. If you can't win the challenge at the moment, demand a provisional ballot and a written explanation of what you need to do to make sure that it is counted. Speak only to official poll workers, and ignore the partisan hack if s/he tries to "help."
6. Ask for help. If there is a problem with your electronic machine, do not press done and leave the polling place. Insist that a poll worker help you until your vote is cast correctly. If it cannot be, tell them they need to request assistance from the appropriate authorities and refuse to leave or cast your ballot until the problem is corrected. If you leave, you've probably already lost. Do not forget to have a paper trail.
7. Ask for more help The Brennan Center For Justice, among other groups, will have lawyers on hand to take reports of problems and offer legal assistance by called 1-866-OUR-VOTE. Use it if you have to. Hopefully you won't have to.

Block The Vote [Rolling Stone]
Beyond Diebold: 10 Ways To Steal This Election [Mother Jones]
Report: Operatives Will Use Internet To Suppress the Vote [Wired]
Ohio Secretary Of State Site Hacked [Wired]
Voter Registration Flashpoints [The Nation]
In Ohio, Charges Fly In Fight Over Absentee Ballots [Washington Post]
Voting Machines Switch Votes; Officials Blame Voters — Update [Wired]

Earlier: There's Nothing Some Fear More Than Citizens Exercising Their Constitutional Rights
The McCain Campaign, Looking For A Scapegoat In ACORN

Richard Hasen, a professor specializing in election law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, says in the Chicago Tribune that ''Election law has become political strategy." Hasen's not wrong, except about the timing — election law has been an electoral strategy since McCain's hero Barry Goldwater ran for President in 1964. Back then, it was called "ballot security" instead of "voter caging," but the principles were the same: target low income and minority voters whose housing situations might not be as stable as your average suburban white Republican voter with mailers marked "Do Not Forward." When they are returned to sender, get the person thrown off the voter rolls since they don't live where they say they live and, abrakazam!, you've got one less vote for the other party. It was so bad and so racist that the Republican party was forced to sign consent decrees agreeing not to do it anymore in 1982 and again in 1986. This, of course, did not stop the Republican party from doing it (at least) in 2004 in Ohio and Florida.

Not that caging was the only electoral problem in 2000, either — former Secretary of State Katherine Harris initiated a "felon purge" that illegally purged at least 2,000 former felons who had their rights restored from the voter rolls as well as thousands of other Floridians with "similar" names. Unsurprisingly, most of these people who were prevented from voting were African-American (and, in many cases, Democrats). Bush won Florida by less than 1,000 votes. But even what limited bad press the Republican party got from that hasn't stopped them in their quest to make sure that as many potential Democratic voters are purged from the rolls in time for Election Day — or should we start calling it coronation day?.

In 2007, the head of the Republican Party in Kansas was so emboldened by the fact that most people don't give a shit if voters (and particularly minority voters) are illegally disenfranchised that he actually sent out a letter bragging about the party's efforts to throw legal voters off the rolls. He's still the chair, by the way.

The Chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County, Michigan told reporters for the Michigan Messenger last month that they planned to challenge voters on election day based on lists of foreclosed homes in the county, in an effort to get voters thrown out of polling places. Of course in Michigan, as in the rest of the country, minority homeowners were far more likely to have been offered subprime mortgages and are thus far more likely to be caught up in the foreclosure crisis in Michigan. Unlike registration-caging which, when done by race, is illegal under the consent decree, it's apparently perfectly legal to challenge someone's right to vote at their polling place.

The Republican National Committee sent out "registration confirmation" mailers to thousands of registered Democratic voters in Florida this summer (you know, when the snow birds weren't there) with "do not forward" noticed attached in order to cage voters there as well. Their spokeswoman told a reporter that it "wasn't worth writing about," because, of course, they'd prefer that you not know that they're undertaking massive efforts to eliminate potential Democratic voters from non-provisional balloting on November 4th.

In Ohio, they've gone even further, filing lawsuits against the Secretary of State to keep anyone from voting in-person absentee that registered close to the deadline — as the woman pictured did. Can't you tell she shouldn't be allowed to vote? Can't you just see it in her face? Ohio law allowed people to vote in-person absentee before the registration deadline and the Secretary of State ruled that ballots not counted until election day weren't votes until Election Day. And — horrors — people that might not have the means to get back to the polls a month after they registered did so. Homeless people! Women at domestic violence shelters! The Ohio told the New York Post that they "smelled a rat" in that, because, you know, increasing voter turnout (which is embarrassingly low in this country) through making it easier for legal but disadvantaged voters to vote is totally shady. This is what they do: when they can't win on the issues, they'll win by hook or by crook or by making sure that your civil rights are violated and you can't do anything about it. Oh, and yes, Republicans are caging votes in Ohio again, too, in case they couldn't disenfranchise enough people by the registration deadline.

But they've got other tactics that they're hoping you can't tie to them. In 2002, the Republican-controlled Congress passed and President Bush signed into law the completely unironically named Help America Vote Act. That's the legislation that ushered in the days of electronic voting machines, by the way. But it also ushered in the days of database-checking and automatic verification that will kick out voter registrations if a typo some data-entry person making $6 stuck in or left out a letter somehow. They're checking your voter registration against your driver's license (took me an extra trip to the DMV to get mine right, by the way) and against the Social Security database which is so error-ridden even Republican-leaning groups like the Chamber of Commerce don't want to have to use it to see if you're eligible to work in this country. Oh, and they don't even have to tell you if you've been purged — you might just show up on Election Day and be told in a crowded room that they think you're a felon or an illegal immigrant or have registered in more than one place. That's not humiliating or intimidating or anything, or designed to get you to give up and go home. And that, of course, is if some GOP operative "observing" the election doesn't decide to challenge your right to vote at all based on some shadily-obtained caged list.

And don't let them pretend that this isn't part and parcel of how they expect to win. They know they're not going to win votes based on their policies at this point — hence with talking about Bill Ayers the "terrorist" BFF of Obama, hence with running nothing but negative ads, hence with not calling out their supporters on yelling "Kill him!" or "Off with his head" at rallies. But if they can't win with that, they'll win with this and hope that, as has always been the case, disenfranchised voters will head home and not scream, shout or try voting again. Because, after all, there's another election they want to win by hook or by crook next year, and a win's a win as George Bush proved in 2000.

States’ Actions to Block Voters Appear Illegal [NY Times]
Voter Reigstration Lawsuits Could Shape Nov. 4 Election [Chicago Tribune]
Voter Caging [Project Vote]
Voter Caging [Wikipedia]
Voter Supression [ePluribus Media]
Botched Name Purge Denied Some the Right to Vote [Washington Post]
Kansas GOP Chair Sends Email Boasting of Voter Caging [Crooks & Liars]
Kansas Republican Party Officials [Kansas GOP]
Lose Your House, Lose Your Vote [Michigan Messenger]
New NCRC Study Shows Racial Disparities In High-Cost Lending Remain Entrenched [National Community Reinvestment Coalition]
Democrats, Florida Elections Officials Criticize GOP Mailing [St. Petersburg Times]
Ohio Republicans Use Lawsuit To Fight for State's Crucial Votes [Wall Street Journal]
GOP Smells Rat in Ohio [NY Post]
Nearly 600,000 Subject to Possible Caging in Ohio [Miller-McCune]
Immigration [U.S. Chamber of Commerce]
Red Flag On Purging Voter Rolls [CBS News]

• McCain suggested he might suspend his campaign again so that he can really broker a bailout plan to save the country and be a hero... and we all know how well that worked out the last time. [The Nation]
• An actuarial company has predicted that McCain has a 25 percent chance of dying in office his second term, which is why Sarah Palin is cracking jokes about Joe Biden's age and asked people whether they want "the new energy, the new face, the new ideas" in the White House in her new interview with Katie Couric. [MSNBC, Politico]
• By the way, despite the fact that Republican leaders initially claimed it was Pelosi's partisan speech that caused Republicans to vote against the bailout plan — a stance mocked by no less than Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann and Rush Limbaugh — it turns out that it was actually Newt Gingrich's fault! He ginned up opposition to the bill to test the waters for a 2012 Presidential run before releasing a tepid statement of support while the Members he conned voted his will in the floor. Dick. [Huffington Post, Huffington Post, Politico, Huffington Post]
• The Republican strategy to win in Ohio — as in Michigan before that — remains to disenfranchise new, poor and minority voters. For real. It's easier than winning based on your candidate or the issues, apparently. [MSNBC, Michigan Messenger]

• Palin's former aides admit that she's a little ADD about debate prep but usually pulls it out in the end because she's all charming and shit. [LA Times, Andrew Sullivan]
• Palin gave her first newspaper interview — via e-mail, naturally — and managed not to stick her foot in it. Her staff managed to do little more than reiterate talking points in e-mail format, but it's a start. [Mat-Su Frontiersman]
• Gwen Ifill broke her ankle this week (Steve Schmidt has nothing to do with it, he swears) but neither rain nor snow nor dark of night will keep her from asking Sarah Palin about foreign policy. [Fishbowl LA]
• Bill Clinton plans to suck it up and do a couple of Obama rallies in Florida so people will stop saying he's bitter and not really keen on an Obama presidency. Now if only he can keep the passive-aggressive slights to himself while doing them! [The Guardian]

"Respect. Personal Responsibility. Honesty. Compassion. Acceptance." And on the back: "Do you value the uniqueness of others?"

What is this school teaching? Hypocrisy? Double standards? That what you look like when you show up is more important than whether you're ready to learn?

Some people argue that students learn better when there are strict dress codes or uniforms; but isn't school also preparation for the real world? And in the real world, you have to pick out your own clothes (and makeup) and deal with the consequences. But in the real world, you're also allowed to express yourself. And there's nothing in the school "rules" about boys and makeup. Frankly, Matt may be learning a lesson the school never intended: This world can be small-minded, petty and unfair.

Video below, because Matt's pretty adorable:

Boy, 13, Fights For Makeup Rights [UPI]
School Makeup Battle [CNN]

• A cat has survived being walled in under a bathtub for 7 weeks in Berlin after the feline crept under a bathtub that was being installed. • More stories of survival: A tortoise narrowly escaped being buried under 50 tons of trash at a landfill after his owners accidentallly threw him in the garbage. • Lunatica Desuna has complied a gallery of the different depictions of the Mona Lisa by famous artists like Andy Warhol, Keith Herring, and Marcel Duchamp. • Jeremy Paxman, a TV-presenter on the BBC network, whines that "the worst thing you can be [in the television industry] is a middle-class white male". • A 21-year-old mother undergoing treatment for cervical cancer has been denied Ondansetron, an anti-sickness drug, because it is supposedly too expensive. • Women at the National Theater in London are getting a chance to shine behind the scenes as art directors, designers, and playwrights by giving over the largest stage to a living female playwright's play, a first for the theater • Child rape is rising in Afghanistan's northern provinces (as the government's control begins to be lost to insurgents). • A 47-year-old man in Scarborough, Ontario has claimed to have seen a vision of the Virgin Mary in his neighbor's tree. • More than 1/3rd of women between the ages of 18-44 have admitted to sharing prescription drugs in a recent study. • Wooser, Tibet's most famous female writer and blogger, has been arrested by police after being accused of photographing military installations. • Cheerleaders in Monroe, Ohio have been banned from wearing their cheerleading uniforms to school because the short skirts violate a new district-wide dress code on skirt length. •

[Image via Cafe Press]

The extant prison nursery programs like the one at the Ohio Reformatory for women in Marysville, has seen only 11% of its graduates violate parole, while the recidivism rate among the greater prison population is 30%. The mothers involved aren't just allowed to care for their babies solo, they're also given "courses on postpartum care, child development, shaken baby syndrome and other topics," says the AP.

Kids benefit from the early bonding as well, as many children are born with incarcerated mothers suffer from higher rates of emotional and behavioral disorders. And anyway, newborns have no idea where they are — they can barely focus their wee eyes! It seems ideal to keep them with their mothers, however profligate, in a controlled environment with supervision and education, rather than thrusting them into the foster care system.

Nursery Programs Allow Imprisoned Moms, Newborns To Bond [AP via Newser]
Earlier: Baby Girls Add Touch Of Pink, Peace To Mexico's Prison System