" Here is a photo I thought you might appreciate that I took yesterday in suburban Cincinnati while going door-to-door for the Obama campaign. All the Obama signs in the neighborhood had been stolen.  -- Jayson Wechter"

The large handmade sign says: You can steal our signs but you can't steal our VOTES. Not this time.

My friend Jayson Wechter (best known for the legendary SF Chinese New Years Treasure Hunt and urban sleuthing adventure) mailed me this snapshot with encouragement to pass it along.

It hurts and inspires, a feeling that reminds me of my visit to Florida four years ago on behalf of Election Protection.  I wrote home to my co-workers and they ended up publishing my tired, off-the-cuff account of the struggles of early voting in Miami.  Seeing it up on Salon when we got home from poll observation late that night was pretty astonishing to me.  Long before Open Salon, and as a non-journalist member of the company, that was completely unexpected.

That whole Miami voting morass seems to be repeating this year.  How outrageous it is to not provide for a heavy turnout, even though it is most certainly not intentional at the local government level.  My take on it is that they anticipate one level of turnout, then can't rachet it up for "must vote" elections like these. That's very hard on low-income urban voter confidence, even if it is not explicit voter suppression. There seemed to be traces of that too, but the simple organization of the process was bad enough.

A deeper, ongoing crusade between elections really needs to be nurtured, to make voting easy, and to make learning about elections easy.   Turns out that Democracy is a radical idea in America, to my surprise.