Joe Biden was encouraging the crowd at his rally in Colorado today to vote early since early voting in Colorado goes on until October 31st. Shep cut away from Joe’s giving his website address for information on early voting and said:

Shep: We won’t interrupt him for the meat of his discussion, but Mary Ann Marsh, why is this early voting so important?

Mary Ann: Well it’s everything Shep. You have to assume that all these polls are much closer than they appear and as Major Garrett said in the earlier segment, any vote you can get before election day is a vote in the bank. You can count those. You can go into election day, know exactly how many votes you have and then based on models know exactly how many votes you have to get on election day. The big thing here Shep that you’ve got to keep in mind is, a good field organization is worth three to five points on election day. You can find three to five points on the ground on election day. So if these polls are close then that’s exactly what’s going to determine this race and you have to say, in that respect, Barack Obama should have the advantage.

This particular line piqued my interest:

You can go into election day, know exactly how many votes you have and then based on models know exactly how many votes you have to get on election day.

I was under the impression that early votes were counted at the same time that absentee ballots were counted, on election day.

So I called up the County Clerk’s office and asked just to make sure.

Early votes are held until election day. So are absentee votes. Then the moving company brings all the voting machines to a warehouse for processing. All the votes are processed at that time.

So, I don’t know how Mary Ann Marsh can know how many votes there are for any candidate. The most she can know is how many early voters there were.

Exit polling, notoriously unreliable, is even harder with early voting, too many places, too many days…

Yesterday, as in the post below, Shep was talking to Mary Ann Marsh and she said (paraphrased because I hadn’t set the TiVo and I was listening to the show on my phone on my walk to pick up the Little Guy at school)

For 20 of the last 26 years Republicans were in charge of the whole thing.

She said this in relation to John McCain having been in the senate and doing nothing to regulate banks, etc, so as to keep them from going belly up…

I made myself a note to check that claim out.

The last 26 years would seem to be starting with the 98th Congress (1983-1985; 1982 elections)

** In the 107th Congress, the Senate majority passed from party to party so that each party held the majority twice during that Congress.

As you can see from the chart above, Mary Ann Marsh’s statement doesn’t work in any way.

The House was held by the Democrats 14 of the last 26 years.

The Senate was held by the Republicans 14 of the last 26 years.

The White House was held by the Republicans 18 of the last 26 years.

Republicans held both the White House and both houses of Congress for two congresses (and part of one), the Democrats for one congress in the past 26 years. But if you go back a little further, Jimmy Carter’s Administration was completely Democrat. Both houses and the White House were in Democrat hands.

And that’s around the time Joe Biden started out in the Senate…

Barack Obama again today talked about John McCain and old boys’ networks and “he’s been in Washington for 26 years”, yada, yada, yada.

Joe Biden’s been in for 36 years.

Isn’t 36 years 10 years more than 26?