All the requests were detected and rejected, but the incident has nonetheless raised concerns about cyberthreats to online voting systems. The improper requests came from a small number of computer IP addresses overseas, which drew the attention of election workers. As NBC noted, "it is not clear whether the bogus requests were an attempt to influence a specific race, test the system or simply interfere with the voting." The originators of the phantom requests could not be traced, the grand jury report noted, as they used proxy servers that make Internet activity untraceable.

NBC noted that while there have been allegations of U.S. election system rigging in the past, experts believe this incident to be the first (although long-anticipated) documented cyberattack attempt. Via NBC:

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From the Washington Post:

In the vast majority of states, the presidential candidate who wins receives all of that state’s electoral votes. The proposed changes would instead apportion electoral votes by congressional district, a setup far more favorable to Republicans. Under such a system in Virginia, for instance, President Obama would have claimed four of the state’s 13 electoral votes in the 2012 election, rather than all of them.

Other states considering similar changes include Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, which share a common dynamic with Virginia: They went for Obama in the past two elections but are controlled by Republicans at the state level.

Nebraska and Maine have already passed laws like these; Virginia's House of Delegates passed a version of the bill on Wednesday, and its state Senate could vote on the plan next week.

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In addition to disenfranchising voters in dense areas, this would end the principle of “one person, one vote.” If Ohio operated under this scheme, for example, Obama would have received just 22 percent of the electoral votes, despite winning 52 percent of the popular vote in the state.

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In Ohio and Florida, high-profile officials responsible for overseeing the vote weren't shy about showing their naked partisanship, seeking measure after measure – with varying degrees of success – to suppress votes likely to trend Democrat. In at least two states, Iowa and Texas, international election monitors were threatened with arrest if they got too close to a polling station.

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Authorities in both states were guardedly optimistic that most polling places would be open in all but the worst-hit areas. In New Jersey, officials said fewer than 100 polling places in the state were without power compared with 800 sites a few days ago. In New York City, just 60 of the city's 1,350 polling sites remained unusable.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said, quote, "compared to what we have had to deal with in the past week, this will be a walk in the park when it comes to voting."

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The disenfranchised millions won't be a random sample of Americans; they'll overwhelmingly be poor and minority voters. And as investigative reporter Greg Palast explains in his latest book, "Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps," they will have been taken out of the game thanks to a coordinated campaign devised by the likes of Karl Rove and funded by America’s super rich -- people like the Koch brothers, hedge fund titan Paul Singer, and Texan corporate raider Harold Simmons, among others — to keep voters, overwhelmingly Democratic voters, from the polls.

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For the most part, the email blowback to that idea has come primarily from angry partisans who either cannot or do not want to consider the painful truths of an election that offers so little substantive choice. These are the same folks who scoffed at Matt Stoller's even-more-expansive must-read on the same subject, and they typically spit back the very same partisan talking points that dominate so much of the media discourse. To them, I have no response, other than to once again beg them to try to think for themselves, rather than to continue outsourcing their political cognition to their preferred campaign surrogates and cable-TV pundits.

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We've noted that voters simply cannot cast a vote at all on such systems when the power is out, and that it's just one more reason why no American should ever be forced to vote on the 100% unverifiable voting systems, incredibly, still in use across most of states such as New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and parts of Ohio which were all hit hard by the storm, along with New York, Connecticut and elsewhere.

We've got a bit of good news to report today, for some of the voters whose ability to vote at all has been imperiled by this inexcusable, completely foreseeable failure by public officials who have long ago been warned about this possibility and yet refused to do the sensible thing and move to a verifiable paper ballot system to avoid it.

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I think public policy is extremely important, and I do believe that a president’s skills, interests and personality can affect his or her success in office. Yet I think that’s the wrong way to go about making this sort of choice.

On Tuesday, I'll be voting for … the candidate nominated by my party.

Indeed, that’s my strong advice to everyone: figure out which party you would prefer to see in the White House, and vote for that candidate, and every other candidate nominated by that party. Doesn't matter who the particular candidates are, what you think of them as people, or as politicians, or anything else. Pick a party and stick with it. That's it.

Given the way U.S. politics works in 2012, one would have to be nuts to do anything else.

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We do know the race will be close. Or do we? Some are suggesting the contest is not as close as polls indicate because the numbers are skewed toward Obama. Or Romney. Take your pick. The bottom line is that there are multiple theories floating around for why Obama will win and Romney lose; and vice versa.

So what will, in fact, determine whether the country moves “forward” with a second Obama administration or “restores the American dream” by electing President Romney? Hell if I know. At this point, some or at least part of every one of the speculative theories below has merit.

Let’s get to the top dozen theories, six for each side, starting with the incumbent.

OBAMA will win because:

1. He’s got a huge field advantage in the swing states.

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The outages persist in a number of states which force the majority of their voters to use 100 percent unverifiable electronic voting machines to cast their votes at the polls on Election Day. If power is out at the polling place on Election Day in those states, voters may not be able to cast their vote at all.

As we warned before Sandy barreled ashore earlier this week, the ability of voters to vote at all --- presuming polling places are not flooded and voters are able to get to them --- is imperiled by states such as Virginia, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, North Carolina and even Ohio, all of which force all, or some of their voters to vote on systems which simply do not work if they do not have power.

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David Axelrod, senior strategist for President Barack Obama's re-election campaign, said this morning, “Obviously we want unfettered access to the polls because we believe the more people who come out, the better we’re going to do," but expressed that his primary concern was for safety, “The best thing we can do is to focus on how we can help people, and hope it all clears out by next weekend."

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As I report in "Boss Rove: Inside Karl Rove’s Secret Kingdom of Power,"  in 2004 the presidential race ultimately came down to Ohio. Today, with the election neck and neck once again, observers are asking whether the election will rest on a variety of unusual tactics used by the GOP to game the system in favor of the Republicans.

Among the GOP techniques used in 2004, Democrats complained about the unequal distribution of voting machines, which resulted in students at liberal Kenyon College waiting in line for as long as 11 hours while conservative voters at evangelical schools zipped through with no lines at all. There were “caging” tactics to challenge the voter registrations of college students, African-Americans and others who vote heavily Democratic. Republican volunteers known as the Mighty Texas Task Force were widely accused of intimidating would-be Democrat voters.

And there were numerous anomalies that some attributed to a computerized “Man-in-the-Middle” attack made possible by the fact that Secretary of State’s office in Ohio used a firm with strong GOP ties, SmarTech, as the “fail-over” site to handle returns on election night.

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"My first time voting was amazing. It was this line in the sand — before I was a girl, now I was a woman," Dunham says.

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Perry gave a free concert at a park in a historically minority neighborhood just northwest of downtown Las Vegas to screaming fans at about 9 p.m., the same time Air Force One landed at McCarran International Airport across town.

Obama later told the crowd: "I believe in you. I need you to keep believing in me."

The Las Vegas campaign event drew more than 10,000 people, according to fire officials and organizers, with long lines still on sidewalks during Perry's 30-minute performance before Obama arrived.

The singer opened with a rendition of Al Green's soul hit "Let's Stay Together," and played five songs, including "Teenage Dream," before ending with a thumping bass drum version of "Firework."

Perry, who recently also played a free concert at an Obama event in Los Angeles, paused before the last song Wednesday to exhort people in the Las Vegas crowd to vote early.

"Don't wait. Go tomorrow," she said. "How many of you are 18 here? It's going to be your first time, right?"

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I am a left-leaner who previously voted for Barack Obama with clear eyes. Having looked at his record, I knew he was no progressive, much less a Marxist, as his conservative detractors claim. He has always been a thumb-to-the-wind politician who shrouds corporate-backed policies in the veneer of altruistic liberalism. But I voted for him because in 2008 he presented the best opportunity for change.

Sadly, that opportunity was missed. Obama betrayed many of his campaign promises, not merely by turning over his economic policymaking to corporate-connected insiders, but, as the Washington Post this week documents, by additionally championing more-extreme versions of the Bush-era civil liberties and national security policies that he once criticized from his platform as a venerated "constitutional lawyer."

Now, four years later, Obama and Democratic Party-affiliated media outlets are demanding that voters ignore this record, or at least believe that a President Mitt Romney will automatically make things worse.

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