There are still hundreds of thousands of absentee and provisional ballots to be counted.

What Rove knows and Democrats are only now just learning is that the endgame in an election isn’t the final tally; it’s framing the narrative in how the final tally is counted.

There are still hundreds of thousands of absentee and provisional ballots to be counted.

Right this minute — right now, go, seriously — contact the national media, plus every media outlet in the close states that you can find — and demand that they not call any results final until the results are actually final.

There are still hundreds of thousands of absentee and provisional ballots to be counted.

The perception that the uncounted votes aren’t important could congeal in the next 24 hours.

If we can get a genuinely partisan organization like Sinclair to pay attention, we can get ordinary newspapers and TV stations to listen.

Let’s email this to our friends, make our calls, and get some real pressure going.

Let’s Sinclair the holy hell out of Ohio. 

Let’s win the endgame this time.

FAIR’s media contact list is here.

Newslink’s complete media list, indexed by state, is here.

Ohio TV stations.  Ohio newspapers.  Ohio radio stations.

GOTV is done.  Now let’s Get Out The Media.

Other stuff… not a lot of good news out there.  Damn.

GOP is gaining roughly four seats in the house.  Senate looks firmly in GOP control.

Seven states are banning gay marriage.  Because that’s so damned important to our society.

Florida will now require parental notification before minors can get an abortion.  Which is really gonna help parental abuse victims a lot.

Incidentally, the two jackasses in robes who OK’d voter challenges in Ohio, favoring the GOP, are both nutjobs appointed by — guess — the GOP.

See, this whole separation-of-powers thing is fragile as hell.  And the courts are already more than half-filled with ideologues willing to skew the process.  If Bush gets to stick 3 right-wingers of his choosing on the Supreme Court, ratified by a GOP-controlled Congress…

I still think Kerry will win.  Even conceding FL (whose numbers really look funky, honestly) to the Bush crime family, Kerry should take PA, MI, MN, WI, WA, OR, and CA, giving him (at this point, 3:30 am in London) 243 EV.  (That’s assuming the votes are all counted and nothing completely insane has happened, which unfortunately is a major assumption.)  That means he needs 27 more votes from some combination of OH, IA, NH, NV, NM, and HI.  I still think that’s entirely likely.

But if that’s not what happens, I know there are going to be some frustrated people around here, and not all of us are particularly brilliant at channeling that frustration into productive, non-violent direct action.  So let me make this clear: anyone posting any comment, anywhere on this site, calling for any violence of any kind will be banned immediately.  No warnings.  It’s not something I condone or will give any forum to.

It’s not a free-speech issue.  You’re welcome to get your own blog and call me any name you like if you think that’s somehow helpful to the world.  But nobody calls for violence on my blog.

End of discussion.

Before going any further, review the Zogby exit polls, which gave Kerry a win, with at least 311 electoral votes.

And yet in state after state, the early numbers are coming in much more Republican.  Much more.  Despite record new voter registrations, young voters, and overall turnout, all of which favor Democrats.

In my limited understanding, it’s not that unusual for early returns to lean to the right, since small, rural precincts are much easier to tabulate than large urban ones.  And absentee votes, which were unusually large and likely left-leaning, have yet to be added.  Still.  Something doesn’t add up.

Given how well the GOP has learned to spin the media, and given how many states have mostly GOP state officials… is it possible that some officials are slowing the release of data from Democratic precincts, which would create a false impression of a sweeping GOP victory for the media, thus enabling later shouts of "fraud" from the right when the votes are all finally tallied?

Just asking.  There must be something I’m missing.  I don’t know how else to explain this.

The urge to vote must be running pretty strong out there.  The poll at left, which, notice, is not even a poll, has already received over 450 votes.  So far, screaming about wrongdoing is winning by a comfortable margin.

Gotta admire the enthusiasm.  I hereby spin this as good for Kerry, on no basis whatsoever.