You can deny that it is non-partisan (even though the effects of their efforts are anything but) but even if you are wide-eyed and innocent about the whole thing, it is pretty obvious that Republican state majorities and Secretaries of State in Florida and Ohio have been doing tons of things which make it harder to vote.
This includes but is not limited to cutting early voting hours, days and locations.
What isn’t as obvious (and even respected pollsters cannot account for this) is how these efforts will change the likely voter scenario in those states (and to a lesser degree other states).
So what do Dopers think? Have the efforts of Florida Gov. Scott and Ohio SoS Husted already affected the vote in ways that might change predictions? Will they continue to do so tomorrow? Will they substantially alter things to possibly move these states into Romney’s win column?
My take is that there will be an effect but that it won’t be enough to change Ohio which I think has enough Obama cushion to get past the partisan chicanery. It might help give Romney Florida but I don’t think Obama needs Florida as much as Romney needs Ohio.
I think that part of what’s so pernicious about this issue is that there’s now way to know, without some extraordinarily in-depth investigation and expertise. So it may be that from on the new “normal”, the new baseline, will be a few percentage points tilted in the R direction, and that will just be the way things are. Or it may not. Might not make any difference at all. Might even have an effect in the opposite direction. Beats me.
But all the ^%$#@ers who promulgated those laws certainly THOUGHT they would accomplish something.
Well, they did, didn’t they? Got clean away with it, too. Ohio and Florida is a fucking disaster, voting wise. I have this dark paranoid fantasy emerging that the Pubbie Plan 9 is to fuck things up so badly, they can plausibly move to have the House of Representatives make the decision. Pretty sure thats just my paranoid fantasy machine working overtime. Sorta. Kinda.
Electoral votes will be cast in both states, so the only way the House decides is if there’s a 269-269 tie.
There is a procedure for deciding what set of electoral votes to accept from a state if two (or more) are sent in (presumably, one voting for Obama, and the other for Romney); it’s a “best of three” among the House, the Senate, and the “executive of the state” in question. This happened in 2004 with Ohio, but both houses of Congress overwhelmingly voted to accept the Bush votes. (They tried this in 2000 with Florida as well, but the law requires that one Representative and one Senator have to object to a state’s vote, and while five Representatives objected, no Senators did - “the version I heard was,” they had cut a deal with the Republicans where the Democrats would be given leadership and majorities in half of the Senate committees, as the Senate was divided 50-50, rather than having the Republicans control all of them because they would have Dick Cheney as the tiebreaker. Note that had any Senators objected, and the Republican-controlled House voted to accept the Bush votes while the (temporarily, as it was 50-50 and Al Gore was still Vice-President) Senate voted to accept the Gore votes, the tiebreaker would have been…Florida Governor Jeb Bush.)