California Special Election Roundup

All the polling was trending away from Arnold at the end of the race, and while the headline of this story puts turnout as "light," the body of it has it far stronger than I think the Republicans would want. Anecdotally speaking, many people I know voted and faced busy polling places.

And this was pretty funny. Maybe now the whole "election reform" thing will hit home:

SACRAMENTO -- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger showed up to his Brentwood neighborhood polling station today to cast his ballot in the special election — and was told he had already voted.

Elections officials said a Los Angeles County poll worker had entered Schwarzenegger's name into an electronic voting touch screen station in Pasadena on Oct. 25. The worker, who was not identified, was testing the voting machine in preparation for early voting that began the next day.

Somehow, Schwarzenegger's name was then placed on a list of people who had already voted, said Conny B. McCormack, the Los Angeles County registrar.

The registrar, a Republican, then had the nerve to claim that "This is someone who breached our protocol and was playing around in advance of the election," intimating some kind of Democratic fraud. If there was fraud going on, do you think in any way someone would start with THE GOVERNOR'S vote? This simply shows how easy it is to break the supposedly wondrous, infallible touch-screen voting system.

Oh, and Breasts Not Bombs got themselves arrested in Sacramento today.

We'll have to wait and see on the results. I predict it'll be close, but the Arnold camp has to be looking at the trend lines and the turnout numbers with despair.