Don’t forget to vote on Tuesday, November 4! Though it seems the Presidential race in this state is sort of sealed up, there are many downballot races that need your attention. We, regrettably, have not covered those races in any detail, and have generally just linked to Doc’s Political Parlor, which has evenhandedly and calmly covered state political races all throughout election season. Props to Doc’s. Also, here’s what to do if you think there’s a problem with your voting (scroll down to the bottom, over the Oprah thing, because I don’t think we have electronic voting in ‘bama):\

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• Call poll supervisors to observe the problem.

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• Fill out a problem report.

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• Refuse to vote on that machine.

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• Request that the machine be taken out of service.

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• Get a serial number of the machine if possible (may be difficult in many cases).

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• Tell other voters in line which machine it was and that they should NOT vote on that machine!

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• Report it to county/town election office.

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• Report it to the Secretary of State.

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• Call local reporters and tell them the story.

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• Call voter problem hotlines (eg. 866-MYVOTE1 and 866-OUR-VOTE) and report it.

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• Contact bloggers and Election Integrity websites.

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• Raise holy hell.

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AND NOW TO THE POINT OF THIS POST. Polls! I wanted to talk about Drudge’s headline earlier that screamed “McCain’s got a 1 point lead!”, but he pulled that headline down and now I can’t find the link on his site. So I googled, and the first site that I clicked on was about that headline, and featured this commentary:\

Let’s drag McCain’s ass over the finish line.

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I just had a flashback to Kerry 2004! That makes me feel better.\
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[On a side note, Obama just said "John McCain's been trick or treating as George Bush for while now" or something along those lines (I'm doing two things at once). Halloween-&-campaign jokes suck. Come on O. You can do better.]\
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I can’t find that Drudge headline now (though I saw it earlier today), but Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com is all over it.\
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Now, Zogby is interesting as a pollster. He didn’t do so well in 2004. He predicted (as much as polls predict anything) a Kerry win in 2004. Oops. Others did as well, granted, but he was wrong.\
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But more than that, Drudge is wrong. It’s cute, but he’s wrong. He got excited about one sentence in Zogby’s poll write-up:\

Pollster John Zogby: “Is McCain making a move? The three-day average holds steady, but McCain outpolled Obama today, 48% to 47%.

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That’s great that one day of small-sample polling weighted in a questionable way (as Silver notes) showed a one-day gain of 5 points for McCain and a 1 point decline for Obama. Doesn’t that sound rather suspicious. And yet, the Drudge Report (which is less relevant every day) runs with a tiny, inconsequential hint-of-a-sentence as their headline. Where are the sirens, Matt? I haven’t seen sirens in months, it seems.\
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Maybe there were no sirens because the questionable Zogby poll is an outlier amidst polls in general which actually show Obama’s lead expanding to 6.6%. On October 30, Obama’s lead had shrunk to 5.9, and on Friday it grew.\
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It looks like the Obamercial had a rather positive effect. Though I doubt the media narrative, at least on TV, will be “Obama’s expanding lead.” How long will they run with the “polls tightening” crap? At least until Tuesday is my guess. There’s valid reason, of course, over a 2-week long trend.\
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If you want to play around with election day results, CNN’s Electoral Map Calculator is a good bit of fun.\
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And if you want to see what Obama’s chances look like from a different perspective, check out Birmingham Weekly contributor Matt Hooper’s Battleground entries (and love his illustrations):\
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New Mexico\
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North Carolina\
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Florida\
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Virginia\
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Ohio\
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Philadelphia