I voted this morning, with no waiting and an efficient operation. In Virginia, at least in our district, we went back from voting machines to old-fashioned, color-in-the-circle paper ballots. As a result, the election officials could set up a bunch of little booths, since all that is needed is not an expensive machine but a cardboard screen that can even be set up on tables. Consequently, we could vote without waiting. The ballots could be counted just as fast as with machines, since we put them through a scanner as we left. The voting machine is one of those high-tech solutions that are no improvement over the low-tech way.

Well, it’s 7:00 p.m. and the first polls have closed. I’m turning it over to you, in the comments. I’ll jump in too when I have something to say.

Thanks for yesterday’s closing arguments on the election. Some thoughts:

(1) No one making the case for Obama talked about how salutary it would be to elect a black man, how this would help heal our nation’s racial wounds and make the world like us again.

(2) Monitoring and moderating comments to follow specific guidelines for a thread is hard.

(3) In the “argue here” post, we actually did attain a moment of agreement, in which people holding all kinds of different views came together on an issue. It was not politics, however, but beer. (More than that, it had to do with the desire for a personal sense of community, which should underly even politics.)

(4) I really appreciate the different people with different views who show up on this blog. Iron really does sharpen iron. And we do see examples of unity in the faith that transcends political differences, however sharply expressed.

Tonight, it is my custom to pull an election vigil, staying up to see how it all turns out.

I thought I’d start an election thread, updating it in the comments, which everyone else can participate in also. So join me in live-blogging the election.

I don’t know if this is happening everywhere, just in the battleground states, just in Virginia, or just in states that require election officers to audibly repeat the name and address of voters as they check in. But this practice disturbs me. From Parties Assign Lawyers to Watch Polls, Turnout - washingtonpost.com:

A training manual that the Virginia Democratic Party distributed to hundreds of lawyer volunteers instructs them on the Obama campaign’s get-out-the-vote effort, called the “Houdini Project.” Lawyers will periodically enter into a database the names of those who have cast ballots so that campaign staff can contact those who have not voted, almost in real time.

“The research that has been done is extremely professional and really unbelievable,” said David Traynor, 24, of Ireland, who traveled to New Mexico to volunteer in the Obama campaign and has blogged on the subject. “It could have a significant effect on the vote, perhaps 2 to 3 percent.”

The training manual instructs volunteers stationed inside the polling places to “mark down targeted voters as they vote.” They will be able to get voters’ names, because Virginia law states that officers of election must repeat “in a voice audible to party and candidate representatives present, the full name and address” of the voter. (If the officer of election does not do this, the manual also instructs volunteers “to politely remind them of their obligation to do so.”)

Then twice during the day, at 9:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m., volunteers inside the polls are supposed to pass the list of voters who have cast their ballots to the lawyers outside the polling place. They, in turn, will call in to a central database and enter four-digit codes assigned to each voter. The names of those who have voted will be removed from the voter database created by the campaign — their names will disappear, hence the name Houdini — so that campaign workers can knock on doors and call those who haven’t voted.

The concept of the secret ballot should be more than just a technical requirement having to do with the content of one’s votes. It should be a principle that governs the whole rite of voting. I’m not even going to tell any exit-pollsters how I voted. I realize that might throw off the networks’ early predictions, but there it is.

Psychiatrist Phyllis Chesler is worried about Pre-Election Psycho-Somatic Hysteria:

There are important reasons to vote for Obama and important reasons to vote for McCain. Neither candidate thrills me, both frighten me but for different reasons. But, what worries me even more than the candidates is the way in which so many Americans seem to have lost both their gravity and their sanity. They are behaving like drunken soccer fans or like ecstatic True Believers undergoing a religious transformation. During Obama’s acceptance speech 100 years ago in Denver, I saw people of all ages, both genders, and of every color, weeping, trembling, transfixed.

Pro-Obama grandmothers are behaving just like “bobby-soxers” once did at a Frank Sinatra or Elvis concert.

McCain-Palin supporters do not seem to be behaving in this way. Perhaps that is because they do not view McCain or Palin as Messiahs. I am not saying that Republican supporters are free of weird and tragic behaviors. Au contraire. A week ago today, I wrote about the young woman (a McCain supporter) who’d claimed she’d been attacked and mutilated by an angry, black, pro-Obama supporter. It was all a hoax, the woman clearly had “problems.”

But this was one individual, it was not an entire crowd; this was a young and powerless individual, not a successful and powerful one.

So, what are we to make of someone like my friend and colleague, the accomplished and hard-working Erica Jong, when she tells the Italian media that she has begun to somatize the election? Insomnia, back spasms and all? I’ve emailed her to find out if she really, honestly said this but as yet, have heard nothing back.

According to Jason Horowitz in the New York Observer, Jong told Corriere della Sera that an “Obama loss will spark the second American Civil War. Blood Will Run in the Streets.” . . .Jong allegedly told Corriere della Sera that her “fear that Obama might lose the election has become an obsession. A paralyzing terror. An anxious fever that keeps you awake at night.” She also mentions that her friends Naomi Wolf and Jane Fonda are “extremely worried that Obama will be sabotaged by Republican dirty tricks” and that it will lead to a “second American Civil War.”

Il Foglio’s New York based correspondent, Christian Rocca, has translated parts of the Jong interview into English. What is going on when Jong and her equally creative, accomplished, and wealthy friends (Ken Follett, Susan Cheever, Wolf, Fonda, Michael Chabon) claim that the Republican Party is causing a psycho-somatic “meltdown?”

According to Jong, Fonda says that she “cried all night and can’t cure (her) ailing back for all the stress.” Jong herself is also suffering from “back spasms” and has had to turn to “acupuncture and valium.” Jong is quoted as saying:

“It’s not a coincidence that President Bush recalled soldiers from Iraq for Dick Cheney to lead against American citizens in the streets…Bush has transformed America into a police state, from torture to the imprisonment of reporters, to the Patriot Act.”

Oh, Erica, say it isn’t so, tell me you were quoted out of context, tell me you took too much valium, tell me anything. What can it mean when smart, feminist women start acting like hysterical nineteenth century heroines? When they feel “victimized” even as their candidate appears to be winning?

Many conservatives are consoling themselves that a time of political exile will do them good, a chance to purify the Republican party for a later comeback. Michael Medved, a political conservative himself, says that just does not happen:

History shows conclusively that a bitter defeat never pushes a conservative party farther right, or pushes a liberal party further left. Instead, political organizations that experience harsh rejection from the electorate move instinctively, inevitably toward the center in quest of precisely those middle-of-the-road voters who abandoned them in the previous contest. After outspoken conservative Barry Goldwater led the GOP to an overwhelming defeat in 1964, the nominees that followed (Nixon twice and then Gerald Ford) clearly represented the more moderate wing of the party. When unapologetic liberal George McGovern brought the Democrats a ruinous 49-state drubbing in 1972, they followed with a long series of relatively centrist, purportedly non-ideological candidates (Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton, Gore), reliably shunning the strong leftist contingent within their coalition.

There is simply no historical model for the process of party defeat, purification and rejuvenation that some deluded conservatives recommend. Consider the sad state of the Republican Party during the 1930’s and ‘40’s. In 1928, Herbert Hoover represented the most moderate, or even progressive, nominee since Teddy Roosevelt in 1904. When Hoover got crushed by FDR in 1932, the Republicans didn’t turn back to solid conservatives in the Coolidge tradition. Instead they kept nominating moderates (Alf Landon, former Democrat Wendell Wilkie, New York progressive Tom Dewey twice, and then the non-ideological General Eisenhower) in the often forlorn hope that they could woo wavering independents or conservative Democrats away from the New Deal coalition. Not even five consecutive defeats on the Presidential level led the Republicans to shift to a more conservative, ideologically rigorous posture.

Today, Barack Obama is running an unusually explicit liberal campaign, and if he loses the presidency the Democrats will almost certainly adopt a more centrist, “New Democrat” image for the next campaign. If, on the other hand, McCain and Palin lose, political operatives will (for better or worse) steer the Republican Party even further toward the middle of the road, seeking a more moderate (or at least “inclusive”) image to attract the centrist, independent, undecided voters who decide almost all elections.

In other words, a McCain victory would force the Democrats to turn to the right, while a McCain defeat would almost certainly send Republicans scurrying toward the mushy center.

I suspect Medved is right in describing how political parties respond, even though the strategy of being moderate won the Republican few elections.

So how did Ronald Reagan start a conservative dynasty so soon after Barry Goldwater’s landslide defeat?

This is sad, coming just the day before the election: Obama’s grandmother dies of cancer in Hawaii.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s grandmother died of cancer, he said in a statement on Monday, a little more than a week after he interrupted the White House campaign to say goodbye to her in Hawaii.

“It is with great sadness that we announce that our grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, has died peacefully after a battle with cancer,” Obama said in a joint statement with his sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng. “She was the cornerstone of our family, and a woman of extraordinary accomplishment, strength and humility.”

Dunham, 86, helped raise Obama from the age of 10 while his mother was working in Indonesia, and Obama took an emotional 22-hour trip to Hawaii to visit her on October 23 and 24.

What it would have meant to her to see her grandson elected president! If he is elected president, that is. But I’m thinking destiny is on his side.

In case this was keeping you from voting McCain/Palin, you should know that Report clears Palin in Alaska’s Troopergate probe:

This time, Gov. Sarah Palin can claim vindication against allegations that she abused her power in office by firing her public safety commissioner.

Palin - running mate of Republican presidential candidate John McCain - violated no ethics laws, according to a report released by the state personnel board on the eve of Election Day. An earlier, separate investigation by the Legislature found that Palin had abused her office.
“There is no probable cause to believe that the governor, or any other state official, violated the Alaska Executive Ethics Act in connection with these matters,” the personnel board’s report said.