Samuel L. Jackson, Robert De Niro, and Rosie Perez are helping the Election Protection coalition get the word out about the Election Protection hotline — 1-866-OUR-VOTE — which voters can call through Election Day for help if they're facing voter suppression tactics or they just have questions about voting. People For the American Way Foundation is part of the EP coalition. The L.A. Times did a nice writeup of the campaign here.

Check out the PSAs below, and please spread the word about the hotline: again, the number is 1-866-OUR-VOTE.

Just caught this item on politico.com about Republican Governor Crist of Florida extending early voting hours to the dismay of some of his fellow Republicans.  Dismay that more people will find it easier to vote in this historic election?  I think Governor Crist got it right when he said:  "This is not a political decision. This is a people decision."  You can read the full post by Ben Smith  here.

Simply ask them if they're going to. So says Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist:

You call and ask people ahead of time, "Will you vote?" That's all. "Do you intend to vote?" That increases voting participation substantially, and you can measure it. It's a completely trivial manipulation, but saying 'Yes' to a stranger, "I will vote"...

According to Kahneman, making this sort of commitment -- even to someone they don't know -- can help motivate people to get to the polls on Election Day.

So... are you going to vote?

(via Marginal Revolution)

You've seen a lot on this site about the inflammatory campaign being waged by the McCain-Palin team and the RNC against ACORN.  It's a desperate political ploy to cast doubt on the integrity of the elections and to divert attention from the real problem:  voter suppression and intimidation  taking place across the country.  Check out this exccellent video from Brave New Films that tells this story.

And click here to read a letter from House Judiciary Committee Chair John Conyers and Subcommittee Chairs Jerrold Nadler and Linda Sanchez to Attorney General Mukasey and FBI Director Robert Mueller asking for assurances that "the full weight of the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation will be brought to bear" to protect the right to vote and the safety of citizens "who serve our democracy by educating, registering, and turning out voters."

Answer: They don't actually exist -- except in the minds of right-wingers. (Well, I'm not actually sure if Pat Robertson and the like believe in unicorns or the Tooth Fairy, but given the outlandish nature of some of their other beliefs, I wouldn't really be surprised.)

Chris Hayes breaks down the non-problem of voter fraud in a great post on The Nation's blog about how he "voter fraud" -- emphasis on the scare quotes -- is a problem that doesn't actually exist:

Every two years, Republicans gin up baseless accusations of "voter fraud," often directed at ACORN. The strategic imperative is simple: create a pretense that will allow them to more credibly hassle and hopefully suppress poor and minority voters.

Just to get this out of the way: in the real world, there is no such thing as voter fraud. There will be roughly as many fraudulent votes cast in this election as there were stockpiles of biological weapons in Iraq. That is to say, none.

Read the whole thing here.

In case you didn’t think that attacks against Senator Obama could get any worse, they, umm, did.

Barack Obama, the Democratic Party's nominee for President, has become a target for white supremacists and other extremists on various Websites and Internet forums since he began his campaign.

The Anti-Defamation League has been tracking these kinds of threats, and they’re pretty nauseating. 

I do not want a half-breed negro prancing around the White House in a loin cloth, smoking crack…I see no reason at all to allow a Communistic negro to occupy the most powerful political office on earth. I see no reason at all to allow a sub-human to do for the United States, what his sub-human pals have done in their countries like Zimbabwe, South Africa and other black-run failed states…Wherever blacks run things, those things are totally corrupt, grossly dysfunctional and ultimately, complete failures.

 Click through to read more, but it’s difficult to get through the whole thing.

I'm not going to sit idly by while good people are thrown under the bus ... especially if that bus is John McCain's "Straight Talk Express." And I am not -- I repeat, NOT -- going to let the Right steal another election by demonizing community organizers while doing all they can to disenfranchise voters.

That's why People For the American Way is not taking the attacks on ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) lying down, and we're not going to let the Right's latest distraction work. We're taking out a full page ad in the New York Times to tell the truth about ACORN, the myth of "widespread voter fraud" and the actual voter suppression being perpetrated by the Right. Check out the ad and find out what you can do to help with these efforts at www.PFAW.org/ACORN.

ACORN has tirelessly worked to uplift the less fortunate and advocated for improved housing, a fair and living wage, and yes, continues to fight to give a voice to the underserved by promoting civic engagement and voter empowerment. John McCain used to know that but he seems to have forgotten.

During Wednesday's presidential debate, McCain was again over the top, saying ACORN "may be perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy." No, Senator McCain, the fraud is GOP attempts to challenge the registrations of eligible voters who are on the verge of losing their homes to foreclosure ... the fraud is right-wing efforts to purge thousands of eligible voters from the voter rolls ... the fraud is the long history of your party's attempts to resurrect Jim Crow.

Let's set the record straight. ACORN plays by the rules, but they register voters the Right would rather exclude, so they are a perfect target in the ongoing effort to stoke paranoia over so-called "widespread voter fraud" (a proven myth). Out of the 13,000 field workers ACORN hired in its drive to register hundreds of thousands of voters, a small fraction submitted inappropriate registration cards. In most cases, ACORN was required by law to submit these incorrect forms, along with the valid forms, to election officials, and in most cases, the incorrect forms had been flagged for officials by ACORN as problematic. But bad registration forms don't add up to "voter fraud."

The Bush administration has spent a good deal of time on fishing expeditions to find problems with groups like ACORN that register voters. In fact, they fired US Attorneys for refusing to participate in this partisan witch hunt.

Using "voter fraud" to distract from real voter suppression is nothing new. But it's still extremely troubling that the McCain-Palin campaign has decided to put party before country and not denounce the GOP's attempts to squash voter participation. I don't think the American people are buying any of this. But even if scapegoating ACORN doesn't work, the Right will have won if they are successful in getting people to look the other way on the real voter suppression in which they are aggressively engaged.

It's up to us to make sure the distraction doesn't work.

Check this out.  The Dayton Daily News is reporting that because Joe "The Plumber" Wurzellbacher's last name is spelled with an "o" not a "u" on the registration rolls, he could be knocked off the rolls under a policy advocated by the Ohio Republican Party in a suit it has filed against the Ohio Secretary of State.  The GOP is trying to get the Secretary of State to send to county board of elections "mismatches" - including ones like these -- where the name on the registration is different from the name on DMV or Social Security records. Jennifer Bruner, the Secretary of State, says the action the Ohio GOP is pressing for could disenfranchise up to 200,000 voters. TheGOP is stirring the pot about ACORN and worried that some election official might let Mickey Mouse vote? Give me a break. Let Joe the Plumber vote, and then let's foucs on the real problem - systematic efforts by the Right to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters

And this just in - it looks like the U.S. Supreme Court has just stayed a lower court order that would have required the Secretary of State to send out these lists of mismatches. Stay tuned for more on that!

Anyone who watched last night’s debate should know that John McCain and his right-wing allies are going to outrageous lengths to smear the reputation of ACORN, a community organizing group which has registered hundreds of thousands of voters for the coming election. But many in the media – especially at Fox News and CNN – have failed the public.

People For the American Way is running a full-age ad (see below) in the New York Times in the coming days to call out the right-wing smears and the failure by many in the press to report the full story.

The truth is that there is no voter fraud problem. This is what the top election experts have consistently concluded. When Karl Rove aggressively pushed the Justice Department to investigate and prosecute voter fraud, they came up empty-handed. But all we seem to hear about from Fox and CNN is that Mickey Mouse was registered to vote.

There are already systems in place to catch petty voter registration fraud. It should be a non-issue. Meanwhile McCain and the RNC are using a handful of negligible but colorful examples to distract from the organized disenfranchisement of thousands, perhaps millions, of legally registered voters through so-called ballot security measures.

Learn more about those efforts here, read more about our ad here, and check out the ad here.