Kerry Pins Hopes in Iowa on Big Vote From Absentees [heads up]

DES MOINES, Sept. 26 - They're off and voting in Iowa, even before all the corn has been harvested.

In the state's 20 most populous counties, which account for about 60 percent of the vote, more than 140,345 absentee ballots had been applied for as of last Wednesday, according to a survey of county auditors by The Des Moines Register. Under Iowa law, anyone can request an absentee ballot, no questions asked, and roughly three times as many Democrats as Republicans did so in the counties studied by The Register. Early voting began on Thursday, 40 days before Election Day.

Which is one reason Gov. Tom Vilsack, a Democrat, is optimistic about John Kerry's chances of carrying the state. Four years ago, Al Gore was outvoted at the polls; his entire 4,144-vote margin of victory in Iowa was from absentee voters.

If he is to win, Mr. Kerry can ill afford to lose states that Mr. Gore won, like Iowa and Wisconsin, two Midwestern battlegrounds.

Most polls show President Bush with a small advantage here (a Mason-Dixon survey, reported last week, had him up, 48 percent to 42 percent, with a margin of error of four percentage points), and both parties are still pressing hard.

On Thursday, John Edwards, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, spoke in Cedar Rapids in close-fought eastern Iowa, and two surrogates for Mr. Bush spoke in the same area last week, his wife, Laura Bush on Friday in Eldridge and Senator Rick Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania, on Saturday in Davenport.

"At the end of the day, it's a very simple thing - Iraq," Mr. Edwards said, perhaps mindful of Iowa's long tradition of supporting antiwar politicians. "George Bush made this mess, and he can't fix it."

Mr. Vilsack said in an interview at the Governor's Mansion that that was the right approach - "a nice, tight strategy, with the candidates focusing on Iraq and their message reinforced by television ads and the daily pounding of the news from Iraq" - because "everyone knows what a disaster Iraq is."

Unlike the case with many other ranking Democrats, he argued that Mr. Kerry's timing was perfect.

"This campaign is like one of those classic John Elway games," the governor said. "The team with the ball at the end of the game wins. You can't surge too early, or you give the ball back, and you can't do that with Karl Rove and George Bush. They're too sharp. If you give them the ball back, they'll go down the field and score."

Normally, Iowa's seven electoral votes are not enough to attract the candidates' attention. This state's usual time in the political spotlight comes at the beginning of the campaign year, in midwinter, not toward the end.

Once the caucuses, Iowa's version of a primary, are completed in January, the state falls off the political map. But this is no normal year, and even small packets of electoral votes are very precious.

"It feels like ground zero here, and it has felt like that for nine months," said Kenneth M. Quinn, a retired diplomat who is president of the World Food Prize Foundation, based in Des Moines. "Both parties are clearly putting an enormous premium on the state, with a visit from someone or other almost every day and an endless barrage of TV ads. It's only seven electoral votes, but it could well be the decisive seven."

Mr. Kerry won the caucuses this year after Howard Dean faltered and Representative Richard A. Gephardt's broad labor support proved insufficient to carry him to victory. So Mr. Kerry is well known to Iowa's electorate, perhaps as well known as Mr. Bush.

But Dennis J. Goldford, an associate professor in the politics and international relations department at Drake University, said the Democrat had "run a remarkably incoherent campaign, which raises grave doubts about his ability to mount a comeback."

As for Mr. Kerry's emphasis on Iraq, Iowans are dovish enough, Professor Goldford said, but in the polls taken to date, "Kerry doesn't get the support of all the people here who think Iraq is a mess."

"To oust an incumbent,'' he added, "you have to make the point that he has created a mess. But you also have to show that you have the ideas and the gravitas to clean it up, and so far Kerry hasn't done that."

David Yepsen, longtime political expert for The Register, said he sensed another problem for Mr. Kerry, rural voters. Mr. Bush has been gaining support in the countryside, Mr. Yepsen said, "because there's a cultural disconnect between the chainsaw gang and the windsurfer," meaning Mr. Kerry, on religious issues, as well as social ones.

The number of farm families is declining precipitously, even in Iowa, but the number of rural voters, some retired and some with jobs in the city, remains highly significant.

So the Democrats' efforts to promote absentee voting could be crucial to Mr. Kerry. For months, they have been sending young canvassers door to door to interview people who otherwise might not vote. They have been searching, Mr. Vilsack said, for potential voters who have children serving in Iraq or who have lost jobs or feel trapped on an economic treadmill or who are worried about the mounting cost of health care.

"There are tens of thousands of people like that," the governor continued. "When the interviewer finds them, he encourages them to apply for an absentee ballot, helps them if they need help and punches their names and their concerns into a Palm Pilot. Then at the end of the day he transmits the information back to our database."

Phyllis Peters, a spokeswoman for the secretary of state, said that as of Thursday, 199,593 absentee ballots had been applied for through the 99 counties.

No one doubts the efficiency of the operation. Representative Jim Leach, an Iowa City Republican who described the presidential outlook here as "murky, fractionally favoring the president," said the Democrats' absentee effort was "the one thing that gives Kerry a better chance than the polls give him."

The Iowa Democratic Party, Mr. Leach said, "has now become the single best organized political party in the entire country."

The question is whether the Democrats will actually succeed in attracting voters to the polls who otherwise would have stayed at home, thus increasing their overall total, or whether they are simply churning the same pool of voters, persuading people to vote absentee who would otherwise have showed up to vote.

Some Republicans speculate that the Democrats want to lock up as many of their votes as possible before the televised debates begin on Thursday, in the event that Mr. Kerry does not do well against Mr. Bush.

One reason Mr. Gore may have run better among absentee voters, Mr. Vilsack speculated, was that most of them did not witness what were widely considered lackluster showings by the vice president in that year's debates.

David Roederer, the Bush chairman in Iowa, asserted that the absentee campaign "won't mean a thing" in the end.

"If you vote them early, you can't vote them late, because you only have so many supporters," Mr. Roederer said, expressing doubt that the Democrats could encourage many new voters signed up. "We're concentrating on Election Day, and we'll beat them there.

"If they get 40,000 more absentees, it won't be decisive. If the spread goes up to 100,000, of course, that would be a different story."

Kerry Pins Hopes in Iowa on Big Vote From Absentees
Arrowhead1952's post (#42):

Just the right thread to post the links to download the absentee forms for Texas Sec of State. Please ping any and all lists you have for Texas FReepers.
Sec of state home page
Voter index
Form Index
Go to the 4th form, which is the "Application for Ballot by Mail". After completing the ballot, send it to the Early Voting Clerk for your precinct. You can get the address from the Voter Information @ 1-800-252-8683. This may take quite a while, as I was on hold for about 15 minutes.

Please let me know if you want ON or OFF my Texas ping list!. . .don't be shy.
No, you don't HAVE to be a Texan to get on this list!

Full Texas Ping List

Being optimistice is nice but as the great Ronald Reagan said....'Trust BUT verify!

We MUST get everyone to vote AND volunteer to work at the polls as an observer, so we can watch out for fraudulent voting.

Insider Report: Dems Have Secret Plan to Steal Election
NewsMax ^ | Monday, Sept. 27, 2004

Democrats May Steal Election as Voter Registration Grows

Despite Kerry's lagging polls, the Democrats still plan to win this November. How?

Perhaps by the old fashioned way: stealing the election. That's the word from a top Republican strategist in Washington who tells NewsMax the Democrats have put an unusual amount of resources into "voter turnout" efforts.

NewsMax's Insider Report reported weeks ago that the 527 groups supporting Kerry, and backed by the likes of billionaire George Soros, were earmarking most of the $160 million they have raised toward voter registration and "get out the vote" efforts.

Approximately two-thirds of the 527 money – or a $100 million – will go toward these efforts. Republicans believe many of these voter registration efforts open up the door for qualified and multiple voting schemes on Election Day.

Worse, the 527's are now claiming they will spend three times what has been previously reported to "get out the vote."

One pro-Kerry group, America Votes, told the New York Times that its backers – "labor unions, trial lawyers, environmental groups, community organizations - will spend $300 million on registration and turnout in swing states, a sum that dwarfs the $150 million in public financing the two candidates together will receive for the entire fall campaign."

NewsMax has also reported that only a handful of states were being targeted for this avalanche of cash, notably Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. However, Republicans believe this will lay the groundwork not for a Democratic electoral victory on November 2nd, but for election theft on November 2nd. NewsMax reports were confirmed this Sunday in the New York Times, which headlined its story "A Big Increase of New Voters in Swing States."

The paper said, " A sweeping voter registration campaign in heavily Democratic areas has added tens of thousands of new voters to the rolls in the swing states of Ohio and Florida, a surge that has far exceeded the efforts of Republicans in both states, a review of registration data shows."

As it turned out in 2000, Bush won Florida by less than a 1000 votes, and Ohio by about 30,000 votes. Republicans have been shy about raising the voter registration and fraud issue because of the race issue; Democrats have been quick to say the Republicans are "racist" for challenging voter registration efforts in minority and inner city areas.

But the Times notes that's exactly where the Democrats have been focusing their resources. The paper reported: "The analysis by The New York Times of county-by-county data shows that in Democratic areas of Ohio – primarily low-income and minority neighborhoods – new registrations since January have risen 250 percent over the same period in 2000. In comparison, new registrations have increased just 25 percent in Republican areas.

"A similar pattern is apparent in Florida: in the strongest Democratic areas, the pace of new registration is 60 percent higher than in 2000, while it has risen just 12 percent in the heaviest Republican areas.

" Of course, the Kerry campaign says it has nothing to do with the 527 efforts, but they appear to be happy with the results. "We know it's going on, and it's a very encouraging sign," Steve Elmendorf, deputy campaign manager for Senator John Kerry, told the Times. He added that these efforts "could very much be the difference" for Kerry.

Steve Rosenthal, the head of another 527 group – Americans Coming Together, or ACT – told the Times, "I think what's happening on the streets, below the radar, is what's going to make the big difference on Election Day." Rosenthal claimed that by Election Day the 527 groups will have registered two and a half million new voters.

A chart in the Times showed that the Democrat registrations are outpacing Republicans in Ohio and Florida by five times or more.

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/9/27/153454.shtml

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