right on...........

Orange County Early Voting Hours Extended Sunday Following Judge's Ruling

ORLANDO, Fla. -- A judge extended early voting hours in one Florida county on Sunday after the state Democratic Party sued in an effort to give people more time at the polls.
Some voters had faced waits several hours long on Saturday, the last scheduled day of early voting. The judge ruled on a lawsuit filed late Saturday in Orange County after an early voting site was shut down for several hours. The Winter Park library was evacuated when a suspicious package – a cooler – was found outside. It was later detonated by a local bomb squad.
Bill Cowles, the Orange County elections supervisor, said that voters who show up on Sunday will be asked to use a provisional ballot because the Republican Party of Florida had appealed the decision. The extra hours will be offered at just the Winter Park library.
The state party also filed a federal lawsuit Sunday morning seeking more voting time in Palm Beach, Miami-Dade and Broward counties.
Voting in Miami-Dade County didn't wrap up until around 1 a.m. Sunday because voters standing in line when the polls closed were allowed to vote.
U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson as well as other Democrats asked Gov. Rick Scott this past week to use his emergency powers to extend early voting. The Republican-controlled Florida Legislature last year cut the number of days available for early voting from a maximum of 14 days to eight days.
Scott and state election officials, however, turned down the extension requests. Secretary of State Ken Detzner maintained that there was not a true emergency that justified the extension.
The federal lawsuit says counties should offer absentee ballot voting at local election offices if early voting cannot be extended.
Christina White, deputy supervisor with Miami-Dade County, said the county had already planned to accept absentee ballots for four hours at its main office.

"That's a service we already provided," White said. "We are hoping that (the Democratic Party) is happy with that."
Absentee ballot voting differs from early voting in that voters must fill out their ballot, place it an envelope and then sign it. The ballot envelopes are opened later and then fed into voting machines.
During early voting, voters place their ballots directly into the voting machines.
The Orange County lawsuit asked that early voting be extended at Winter Park and that the court ask local television and radio stations to let voters know about it.
The lawsuit included sworn statements from several voters who said they waited in line for hours and were turned away because voting was suspended at the site. A volunteer with the campaign of President Barack Obama said that the crowd of voters dwindled from 300 to just 40 after voting was halt

yikes..........

Beck Acts as a Bridge Between Romney and Evangelical Christians

On radio and on his Internet network, the influential conservative pundit Glenn Beck frequently invokes God, religious freedom and the founding fathers, but he does not regularly discuss his own Mormon faith.

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Andrew D. Brosig/The Daily Sentinel, via Associated Press

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But in early September, he broke with practice and hosted a special one-hour show, asking his audience, “Does Mitt Romney’s Mormonism make him too scary or weird to be elected to president of the United States?”

Mr. Beck has not always supported Mr. Romney. (“I think he’s an honorable man, but I don’t trust him,” he said last year.) But as perhaps the best-known Mormon after the Republican presidential candidate and a major influence on evangelical Christians, Mr. Beck has emerged as an unlikely theological bridge between the first Mormon presidential nominee and a critical electorate.

At the same time, Mr. Beck’s defense of his and Mr. Romney’s shared faith speaks to the long-frayed relationship between evangelical Christians and Mormons and raises the question of whether evangelicals will ultimately put aside religious differences and vote on common conservative issues.

During his special program, Mr. Beck took questions from mostly evangelical Christian listeners, colorfully debunking misperceptions about Mormonism. The “magic underwear” was compared to a skullcap, and Mr. Beck insisted that polygamy was seen as a “perversion” in the modern church.

“It’s not weird to be a Mormon,” he assured his listeners at the end of the program, “and it’s not weird to be president if you’re Mormon.”  

 Although Mr. Beck’s national media profile has waned since he left Fox News last year, his support among his core audience remains strong. “The Glenn Beck Program” is typically the third-most-popular talk-news radio show, after “The Rush Limbaugh Show” and “The Sean Hannity Show.” In September, an agreement was reached with Dish Network to bring Mr. Beck’s online network, The Blaze, to traditional television.

Mr. Beck’s unique position as both a Mormon and a prominent voice among evangelicals has been too tempting for Mr. Romney’s campaign to pass up. Campaign officials have quietly courted Mr. Beck, according to a person briefed on his meetings with campaign surrogates who could not discuss private conversations publicly. Mr. Beck declined to comment for this article.

Last month, Mr. Beck, along with former Vice President Dick Cheney and Mr. Romney’s son Josh, headlined a Dallas fund-raiser that brought in more than $250,000 for the Romney Victory committee, and on Friday Mr. Beck held a rally in Columbus, Ohio, intended to influence voters in that swing state. On Saturday, he attended Mr. Romney’s rally in Dubuque, Iowa.

Stalwart conservatives who support the Romney-Ryan ticket, like Representative Louie Gohmert, Republican of Texas; Rick Santorum, a former senator and Republican presidential candidate; and retired Lt. Gen. William Boykin, have appeared on Mr. Beck’s program not so much to tout Mr. Romney directly as to discuss hot-button political issues like the handling of the attack on the United States mission in Benghazi, Libya.

Mostly Mr. Beck has helped Mr. Romney by directly addressing his devout Mormon faith, something the candidate himself rarely does. “I believe Mr. Romney prays on his knees every day,” Mr. Beck said recently on his radio program. “I believe he is being guided.” He has also said that a Romney victory would be “a sign from God.”

Mr. Romney already enjoys a commanding lead among white evangelical Protestant voters — 76 percent to 17 percent for President Obama, according to a Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey released on Monday, and 54 percent to Mr. Obama’s 39 percent among Protestant voters. Influential Christian leaders including the Rev. Billy Graham and Ralph Reed have endorsed Mr. Romney.

But deep-rooted tensions between Mormons and evangelical Christians persist, and could affect the turnout on Tuesday, several evangelical leaders said.

“Romney has staked out issues that are aligned with evangelicals,” said Bryan Fischer, director of issue analysis for the conservative nonprofit American Family Association. But, he added, Mr. Romney’s faith may ultimately present a problem in the voting booth. “It’s still an issue for some evangelicals and may influence their voting decision on Nov. 6,” he said. “There are a number of evangelicals who will not vote for someone who doesn’t adhere to orthodox Christiani

Presidential Polls 2012: Obama's Battleground Advantage Holds

WASHINGTON -- The veritable fire hose of data turned on in the final days of the 2012 campaign leaves little doubt that while the national popular vote remains too close to call, President Barack Obama holds slim but meaningful leads over Republican nominee Mitt Romney in the battleground states that will likely decide the presidential election.
With just three days remaining before votes are counted, most of the national tracking polls continue to show a basically deadlocked race, with six new surveys released in the last 24 hours showing roughly the same findings as those from earlier in the week.

In nominal terms, most polls now show either a tie or a slim Obama edge, but the differences between Obama and Romney in any one poll are too small to be considered statistically significant.
The HuffPost Pollster tracking model, which uses data at the national and state levels to produce estimates of the combined polling snapshots, continues to show a national deadlock. However, for the first time in two weeks, Obama's percentage of the national popular vote was just slightly higher than Romney's, according to the tracking model (47.4 to 47.2 percent, as of this writing).
But even when all of the national polling data is combined, neither Friday's uptick for Obama nor the razor-thin margin separating the candidates nationwide is statistically significant. In plain English -- as of this writing, the polls collectively tell us that the national popular vote is just too close to call.
The snapshot is different, however, within the battleground states that will likely decide the outcome of the election