by Whitney Blair Wyckoff

Tony Zirkle, who spoke at an Adolf Hitler birthday party last month on how prostitution and pornography impact white women, came in third place in Indiana's 2nd Congressional District Republican primary yesterday. Fighting prostitution and porn is a major plank in Zirkle's platform.

He has said that he will speak to any group who invites him, but he dodged questions from an Indiana paper asking whether he was a white supremacist sympathizer.

Washington Post columnist Al Kamen has the story:

Tough news last night in the closely watched Republican primary in Indiana's 2nd Congressional District.

Zirkle, whose top campaign issue is opposition to pornography and prostitution, finished a distant third behind Goshen, Ind., businessman and GOP establishment candidate Luke Puckett and Culver, Ind., newspaper delivery man Joseph Roush. Puckett won with 48 percent of the vote; Zirkle drew 16 percent.

by Mark Silva

Barack Obama has built some of his campaign for the White House on a hope that young voters will respond to his party's call this year.

Not a bad calculation.

"The current generation of young voters, who came of age during the George W. Bush years, is leading the way in giving the Democrats a wide advantage in party identification, just as the previous generation of young people who grew up in the Reagan years -- Generation X -- fueled the Republican surge of the mid-1990's,'' the Pew Research Center reports.''

Increasingly each year, more young voters are leaning Democratic.

"In surveys conducted between October 2007 and March 2008, 58 percent of voters under age 30 identified or leaned toward the Democratic Party, compared with 33 percent who identified or leaned toward the GOP,'' reports Pew's Scott Keeter, director of survey research. "The Democratic Party's current lead in party identification among young voters has more than doubled since the 2004 campaign, from 11 points to 25 points.

"In fact,'' Keeter writes, "the Democrats' advantage among the young is now so broad-based that younger men as well as younger women favor the Democrats over the GOP -- making their age category the only one in the electorate in which men are significantly more inclined to self-identify as Democrats rather than as Republicans.

"While more women voters in every age group affiliate with the Democratic Party rather than the GOP, the gap is particularly striking among young women voters,'' Keeter adds. "More than twice as many women voters under age 30 identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party as favor the Republican Party (63 vs. 28 percent).

For more on the survey's findings, see the Pew report.

by William Neikirk

You can be sure that the sexuality of older Americans will become a bigger issue now that Jane Fonda is showing interest in the subject.

Last week, the 69-year-old actress told reporters at an aging seminar in New York that she plans to write a book dealing partly with the sexuality of aging, and also let it be known she is interested in making a movie on the topic.

Her book is actually about another chapter in her life, and the working title is: "The Third Act: Entering Prime Time," she said. Her last book, she reminded us, was a best seller.

A group of reporters attending the week-long seminar, sponsored by the International Longevity Center-USA and the New York Times Foundation, were surprised when Fonda showed up for their sessions to learn more about aging issues in the U.S.

by William E. Gibson

Ever since the tumultuous 2000 presidential election, Democrats in Florida and elsewhere have clamored for election reforms that create a way to verify ballots in case they need to be recounted.

The cause suffered a setback this week when Democratic leaders yanked a paper-trail bill from the U.S. House agenda, apparently because they could not round up enough votes to pass it. Maybe next week, they said.

The bill would require each polling place to register votes on paper to verify balloting. Governor Charlie Crist already has signed a similar law in Florida, but he and other state leaders hope Congress will create the same requirement on the national level because the bill would provide federal money to help pay for it.

Election reform is always popular right after a disputed election, but enthusiasm wanes between elections. The winners, who got elected through the current system, are not as quick to change it. And their attention quickly turns to other pressing matters, such as war and bloated budgets.

Posted by Frank James at 7:30 am CST

Curtis Gans, an expert on voter participation in American elections, predicts that if nothing changes between now and Election Day, Democratic turnout should exceed that of Republicans in a mid-term election for the first time since 1990.

President Bush and the Iraq War get the credit for that, according to Gans.

But the larger picture portrayed by Gans, director of the American University Center for the Study of the American Electorate, in a new report doesn't offer much to cheer about. That's because voters who are turned off by both major parties are leaving them in a significant exodus.

Meanwhile, many other citizens just aren't voting at all, threatening the health of American democracy, Gans says.

Posted by Frank James at 2:27 pm CDT

Congressional Republicans, especially those in the House, wanted a photo op of President Bush signing the “Secure Fence Act of 2006” and today they got it.

With illegal immigration being a major issue for many voters, and not just conservatives, House Republicans badly wanted the fence legislation heading into the mid-term elections.

Posted by Frank James at 4:55 pm CDT

The House passed today by a largely partisan vote of 228 to 196 the Federal Election Integrity Act of 2006 which would require anyone wanting to vote in a federal election to present polling place officials with a government-issued photo ID.

But according to the legislation, it can’t be any old government-issued photo ID. It must be one that proves its holder is a U.S. citizen.

Posted by Frank James at 11:34 am CDT

Diebold Election Systems Inc. issued a statement last night rebutting the Princeton University computer research team that said it found flaws with an electronic-voting machine made by the company.

The Princeton researchers said their examination of a Diebold AccuVote TS machine suggested that malicious software code could be introduced into a machine and allow someone to manipulate election results.

In its press release, the company explained why, in its view, such manipulation would be impossible.

"The unit has security software that was two generations old, and to our knowledge, is not used anywhere in the country," said Dave Byrd, president of Diebold Election Systems in a written statement.

"Normal security procedures were ignored," said Byrd. "Numbered security tape, 18 enclosure screws and numbered security tags were destroyed or missing so that the researchers could get inside the unit. A virus was introduced to a machine that is never attached to a network.”

Posted by Frank James at 5:45 pm CDT

A team of Princeton Universtity computer researchers say they've found serious vulnerabilities in an electronic-voting machine made by Diebold Co. which, according to the scientists, leaves the machine open to sabotage that could result in significant voting irregularities.

What's frightening is that most people wouldn't even know there were irregularities. A piece of malicious software code inserted into a Diebold AccuVote-TS machine by someone with "criminal" intent, could cause votes for one candidate to be wrongly attributed to another and do it in such a way that election officials would never detect it, the computer experts said.