Voting, 2012 Presidential Election | featured news

Here's one more way swing states stand out: Their citizens are more likely to vote. That may not be surprising given, in this year's presidential campaign, the battleground states were deluged by TV ads and targeted for sophisticated get-out-the-vote operations. After all that, 10 key swing states had significantly higher turnout than the rest of the USA, an analysis of data by the non-partisan Center for the Study of the American Electorate shows.

Election officials in the Atlanta area are defending their decision to allow singer Usher to bypass long lines and cast his ballot on Election Day, infuriating voters who had to wait...

Sporadic problems were reported Tuesday at polling places around the country, including a confrontation in Pennsylvania involving Republican inspectors over access to some polls and a last-minute court fight in Ohio over election software. One Florida elections office mistakenly told voters in robocalls the election was on Wednesday....

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted now stands accused of ordering for "experimental software patches" to be installed on the vote-counting machines in a number of Ohio counties. According to the Columbus Free press, voting rights activists are concerned that the software patches, which are usually utilized to update or change existing software, could possibly affect over 4 million registered voters, including those in the state's most populated counties near Cleveland and Columbus.

Just two days from the finish, President Barack Obama's campaign is mobilizing a massive get-out-the-vote effort, as Republican Mitt Romney makes a play for votes in Pennsylvania.

Lines swelled Friday outside early voting sites around the Triangle as time to cast a ballot before next Tuesday's election dwindled. As of Friday afternoon, almost 2.39 million votes had been cast statewide, with 93 percent of those as in-person ballots at early voting sites. The total represents more than a third of registered voters in North Carolina and is approaching the 2.64 million early votes cast in 2008.

In an era when hackers can humble businesses, it's a reasonable question: Could our votes be at risk? The answer, experts say, can be boiled down to campaign-speak: There is work to be done, but we're better off now than we were four years ago.

Democratic claims that a large number of Americans could be prevented from voting because of photo identification laws are probably overstated based on evidence from Georgia and Indiana, the two states where the laws have been in place for multiple elections, Reuters found... Data and numerous interviews by Reuters reporters also suggest there is little evidence to bolster Republican assertions that ID laws are needed to combat rampant voter fraud.

The campaigns are ready for Election Day -- so are their legal teams. President Obama and Mitt Romney both have battalions of lawyers ready to litigate any voting disputes that could affect this year's election. Legal strike forces are now a campaign standard, thanks largely to the disputed 2000 recount in Florida between George W. Bush and Al Gore.

The President voted Thursday in his hometown neighborhood in Chicago. He cast his ballot in between stops in Cleveland, Tampa and Richmond. Obama is pumping up efforts in key states, visiting eight states in two days.