for state supreme court. but we need turnout in california and we need them. >> bradley whitford, great to have you with us. that's "the ed show." i'm ed shultz. now to the quarterback of last night's coverage, rachel maddow. her show starting right now. >> the patriots are not having the best quarterback year, so i'm taking that with a little worry. >> you were okay on sunday from what i saw. >> we took it into extra time to give everybody extra time with their ulcer doctors, but the quarterback is a little unnerving. >> last night was fun. thank you for staying with us for the next hour. i do have something to say about last night's debate, and i hope you'll indulge me for a moment.

last night was the last moment where the whole country will be watching the exact same thing for the exact same amount of time before we get down to election day. last night was our last collective moment as a nation, watching the same candidates at the same time in a way that was unmediated that brings us together as a country. this past july, mitt romney made the first visit of any candidate to the great totally nonswing state of montana. montana has a close senate state, but for president, montana is not hotly contested. so the candidates would usually stay out of a state like that except when they had to be there to raise money. that's when mitt romney was doing in july. at that fundraiser, mitt romney recounted an anecdote from his business career and related that to the presidency of ronald reagan. he told the donors at the event he had three rules when he ran

bain capital. the first rule was focus. the second rule was focus. and the third rule was focus. then mr. romney pulled out this presidential historical anecdote to illustrate what he said he meant by that kind of focus. here's how mr. romney's remarks were quoted in the press report that day. the idea was put all your energy and passion at the job all the hand. i heard from secretary jim baker just a couple weeks ago. e he said in the first hundred days of the reagan presidency, we had a national security meeting one day where we talked about developments in latin america that were of concern. and after that meeting, president reagan called me in and said, i want no more national security meetings over the next 100 days. all of our time has to be focused on getting our economy going.

mitt romney told this to a bunch of donors in montana in july. this is the thing he was praising ab the ronald reagan presidency. it turned out this never happened. he never stopped his briefings because he said he needed to focus on the economy instead. after mr. romney told that story and it was reported in "the wall street journal". the editor said he went through the notes on reagan's presidency to check the story by mr. romney. he said he could find no evidence this happened. jim baker himself later told josh rogan that mr. romney perhaps misunderstood the story when he told it to him. this idea that ronald reagan just stopped working on national security so he could focus on something more important, mitt romney says that happened. but it did not happen. more importantly than him getting the story wrong though is that romney told the donors that story that day because he thought that was a good idea for

what a president should do. he was using that story as a way of praising ronald reagan. i want no more national security meetings over the next 100 days. wasn't that great he did that? this is sort of amazing. the idea that a president could opt out of working on foreign policy. say, that's not my area of focus. i need to focus on something else. when mitt romney suggested in july to those donors that that would be his approach as president, even mr. romney's supporters on the right got mad at him for saying that. a former george bush speech writer saying, the fact he thought it would be desirable to ignore the world for 100 days is troubling. the fact that romney is recounting this anecdote does not reflect his understanding of the job he's campaigning for. there's no foreign policy subject on which i agree with either of those guys. they are absolutely the opposite

end of the number line for me in terms of what i think america should do in the world. but even though i would agree with these guys on nothing else, on this, yeah, duh, i think we can agree that foreign policy is part of the job of president. that trying to get out of that isn't a good plan. national security is not something a president can say he doesn't want to work on. we have an answer for that. >> we can't be all things to all people in the world, jim. and i think that's where maybe the vice president and i begin to have some differences. i'm worried about overcommitting our military around the world. i want to be judicious in its use. >> we have to be careful when we commit our troops. we have a disagreement about the use of troops. he believes in nation building.

i would be careful about using our troops as nation builders. >> even beyond the use of troops around the world, george bush said when campaigning in 200, i'm not so sure the role of the united states is to go around the world and say this is the way it's got to be. we can help, maybe it's the way we want to help people. i just don't think it's the role of the united states to walk into a country and say we do it this way and so should you. that was george bush running in 2000. it turns out you don't get to decide what sort of presidency you have. george bush was essentially saying he wanted to have a domestic policy presidency. remember compassionate conservatism? he wanted less of a role in the world. you don't get to decide what circumstances confront you and you don't get to opt out of of your responsibility. and some presidencies, for better, for worse, sometimes for a year at a time, sometimes for whole presidential terms, sometimes those presidencies end

up being about america in the world. and the commander-in-chief part of the job. sometimes presidencies end up being about war. george bush i don't believe set out to have that kind of presidency, but that's the kind of presidency he got. into the vacuum of his lack of any substantiative ideas on foreign policy at all stepped a well-organized group of unelected, opportunistic radicals who over the course of the next eight years brought upon this country the most disastrous foreign policy in american history and we're not over it. now while we're in the 12th year of one of the wars started in that era, the republican party is offering another choice for president who is promising a nonforeign policy presidency. mitt romney did not mention the issue of foreign policy in his closing statement at the foreign policy debate last night. this is not his field, and he's not pretending that it is. he doesn't want it to be his field. nobody has perfect foresight about what their presidency is going to be like, what they are going to have the option of working on or not working on. but the pressing nature of this issue now is not that it's hypothetical.

it's about seeing what's going on right now. we are still actively copeing with one of the foreign policy disasters left over from the last time a guy said he didn't want to work on this as an issue. if you take the issue of afghanistan, which you'll have to take on if you want to be president, this was the republican nominee's position on afghanistan right up until last night. >> in afghanistan the surge was right. but announcing a withdrawal date, that was wrong. the taliban may not have watches, but they do have calendars. >> the biggest mistake he's made in afghanistan for one, announcing a specific date that we would withdraw. >> this president announced the date of a withdrawal. he announced a withdrawal of our surge forces. that was wrong. >> that was wrong. as recently as two weeks ago, romney's position is that announcing a date for withdrawing from afghanistan was the biggest mistake president

obama made. it was wrong. then last night -- >> we're going to be finished by 2014, and when i'm president, we'll make sure we bring our troops out by the end of 2014. >> it's the biggest mistake president obama had ever made. mitt romney, forget it. i'll espouse it too. i don't feel like talking about it. afghanistan is not the only issue. even just on international affairs. to be the guy who didn't mention the war at all in your convention speech, to being the guy who still made no mentions of veterans last night, even as the president went back and talked about veterans, still nothing from mitt romney. then a turn on your policy two weeks before the election, an election that will decide if you become the commander of the troops in the war that you're ignoring. two weeks before the election as if that's something that requires no explanation, and

you're just assuming people don't care about it enough to notice? i use this term with hesitance, that but reflects a lack of seriousness about something that affects 68,000 american families directly. 68,000 american families who have real skin in the game right now because a family member of theirs is in afghanistan, which is our war. 68,000 americans whose lives will be in mitt romney's hands if he's elected. he can't be bothered to come up with a position on it. this is not a question of whether you agree with mitt romney or if you disagree with mitt romney on whatever his policy of the moment is. the amazing thing here, and the reason the debate was important, is that the republican party just four years after george bush, republican party has nominated somebody to be president who doesn't seem to take this part of being president seriously. he doesn't care about this as a

matter of policy. he doesn't think you do either. he doesn't think it's relevant. a group of mitt romney foreign policy advisers told "the new york times" that even they are not sure that mitt romney's even reads his campaign's own briefing materials on the subject of foreign policy. we saw mitt romney insist that syria is iran's route to the sea. for the record, iran and syria are real countries that exist on a specific place on the map. look on the right. that's iran. on the left, that's syria. notice they do not touch. notice also there's a sea over by syria, but iran has access of its own. syria is iran's path to the sea. what are you talking about? it's not that he just got it wrong. he said this four or five times. there hasn't been a corrective? the republican campaign for thinks this is so unimportant they have never even bothered to try to get it right. they have never checked. the nominee doesn't care about

being called out to make sure he's not called out on it again. bother to look at a map. you carry an ipad. there's maps. there's an ocean below iran. it's blue. it's the persian gulf. it's the not caring about getting it right that is the big new thing here. the i'm not going to try to win this debate. i'm not going to bother having a policy. i'm not going to mention the war. it's not on my list of things that i find important. nobody is judging me on this. this is just not the kind of presidency that you choose to have. ronald reagan chose to not work on national security. you don't get that chose. that didn't really happen about ronald reagan. you made that up. this is one job you don't get the choice. there's nothing in the portfolio of responsibilities that can be delegated to somebody else. when people try, we get historic disasters in this country.

and the fact that you've brought on all of the same whirlwind of advisers who reaped this disaster when a disinterested president named george bush had the same attitude, that's a good thing that the last word before voting that we got collectively as a nation was the chance to hear you forced to talk about foreign policy. mitt romney said his big idea on iran last night was he wanted to indict the iranian president for genocide. who is going to arrest him exactly? mitt romney's running mate is trying to get away with saying he didn't vote for the defense cuts that are called the sequester. he says he didn't vote for those. then who forged his name? whether or not you agree with that vote or not. whether your politics are like mine or bill crystals or somewhere in between, the problem is that the republican party has run a ticket for

president that seems to think this does not matter. they don't even care enough to try on this subject. just stand with him. they do not think there's any political cost to barely phoning this in.est that everybody talks about is a stupid beltway term, but the commander-in-chief thing is a real thing. it's not just a poetic sin. you don't get to opt out. if you're going to try, you cannot just hope that we don't notice. even two weeks out. dan rather joins us next. where others fail, droid powers through.

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i just want to point out in the same way that governor romney didn't mention the afghan war in his convention speech, he didn't even mention our veterans last night. the men and women and their families who have served this country so bravely, they deserve better from somebody who is applying to be commander-in-chief. >> i have the greatest respect for the men and women who serve our country. and i will not continue to reduce the number of ships we have and the number of planes we have and the number of soldiers we have. i'll make sure we protect our military and keep them second to none in the world. >> president obama in florida. both campaigning in swing states with 14 days to go before the election. where they are going now and at what speed is an amazing story about what's going on in the campaign.

that's coming up. but first joining us now is dan rather. sir, thank you for being here. >> always a pleasure. >> i feel like we have made this a regular post debate thing which is satisfying to me. do you think it's significant that romney made the change in position on the war? >> it's certainly significant. whether it registers for those voters that are undecided or not, i'm not quite sure. it certainly should register. it stood out in the debate. once again, he's changed position. not a small change at all. he said i'm not committing to a timeline in the second debate. last night, complete change over to the other side. this comes to a point about kovj of the campaign. we tend to cover the horse race each time. all of us in the press, myself included, and emphasize the

latest poll. each time we say the next time around we're not going to spend as much time on the horse race aspects, there are important policy differences between the two candidates and you see a lot of post debate about what the overnight polls show and very little about where the differences in policy are. this is what one candidate stands for and this is what the other one stands for. it's important that viewers and voters understand that those of us in the press, again myself included, are not doing their job. then there's the question of who is what money to whom and expecting to get what. each time around we think we're going to concentrate on that and we haven't nearly enough. >> one of the consequences of the focus on the horse race as opposed to the focus on policy is i think you see very obviously the extent to which

politicians think they can change their policies on even very important issues. they think they have a lot of wiggle room because they think people aren't paying attention. and so there's no real cost to them at changing. for me, i will tell you my feeling about these guys is that if it is something that matters to them, one way you're going to know is they are not going to change on it. that shows a seriousness. >> very good point. it's also a point that the romney camp has made the gamble. that look, we can change where we stand. we can make significant changes and people are either going to notice or it's not going to matter to them. otherwise they wouldn't have changed on afghanistan. the night after the election, the morning after the election whether they placed that bet correctly or not. that governor romney's campaign is convinced that they have momentum. they have had it since the first

debate. and they are counting on a late close as ronald reagan did against president carter in 1980, a late shift. however, historically, often late closers wind up losing. humphrey closed late against nixon in 1968. came back a loser. john kerrigan began to narrow the gap on president bush but didn't bring it home. but the idea they are going to get a late momentum over the last weekend before the tuesday vote, they are hoping and praying for that. who knows, but the historical record doesn't support it. >> on the issue of reagan, i have been chewing for a long time on this anecdote that mitt romney told donors in montana in july that ronald reagan has called off his national security briefings for 100 days just to focus on the economy. not damning him, but praising him for it. i want to know your read on that either in making it up or in

what it would say about reagan if it were true? >> it would say about reagan is he didn't take the commander-in-chief role seriously, which he did. number one, what candidate was the case saying i don't want any meetings. i want to focus on the economy is not true. i put it in bold caps, it's not true. the fact that governor romney would use it as an indication of this is surely how i plan to do it. economy is my issue and that's what i'm going to focus on. but again, does it matter? will it matter with the election? i would like to believe it will matter. i hope that it did. i think that it will. but we can't be assured that it will. >> i look at the city of st. louis holding a parade on its own to welcome home troops from iraq and i think it didn't going to matter.

>> you follow these things very carefully. at the republican convention candidate romney failed to mention veterans in the address. and then again in last night's debate he fails to mention the veterans. i don't understand how that happens. it's not smart politics for that to happen. >> i don't know how you get this far on presidential politics if you're the kind of guy that will let it happen. dan rather, thank you for being here and lending some very well appreciated perspective on this subject. i appreciate it. we'll be right back. [ cheeping ] [ male announcer ] you hear that?

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two weeks out and there are stories about things getting better and there are stories about things getting worse. you get to pick the half fullness or half emptiness of your glass as you read the papers. let's start with the good news. do you remember the scary voter fraud billboards? that maybe it seemed like trying to vote would get you years in jail. dozens of billboards went up in predominantly black or hispanic neighbors in cities like cleveland and cincinnati and milwaukee. we noted that nobody was admitting to paying for them except an unnamed private family foundation. the company that owns the billboards initially said, yeah, they would take them down but it would take a few weeks, which was convenient timing given the election. i know. promise this is good news, i swear. starting yesterday, those billboards did start to come

down. 140 of them. clear channel changed its mind and now says the billboards violated policy against anonymous political acts. now in the place of those old billboards, look what's going up in cleveland. 15 of these. voting is a right, not a crime. these are going up instead and signed by the cleveland city council. in milwaukee, they are putting up billboards encouraging people to vote early. that's one nice piece of good news about the billboards in ohio and wisconsin. here's another piece of good news. in mississippi the new law requiring voters to show i.d., they never had to show before, that law got blocked by an action by the justice department. the law will not be in effect for the election. you don't need to show an i.d. in order to vote this year in mississippi. still though, the republican

state official in charge of mississippi elections spent all summer long telling people in that state that you do have to have an i.d. so if you don't have a driver's license in mississippi, you can still vote but your state government has been busy spending your taxpayer dollars trying to convince you to not bother to vote. voter i.d. as i said, though, good news. it's been changed. look. the jackson free press started raising a stink about this. now finally the state election website says the truth. mississippi's voter i.d. law will not be in effect for the november election. it is a teeny tiny statement, but at least it's finally true. and a bunch of regular folks in mississippi are doing what they can to try to get the word out a little louder. including this true message written on the back window of her own car by the beloved mississippi aunty of one of this show's producers. no voter i.d. required to vote

in mississippi. for the prospect our election should be free and fair and not purposely confusing, all good news. right? right. then there's the other side. then there's colorado. hold on. that's coming pup. zeebox is the free app that makes tv even better. if your tv were a space captain, zeebox would be an alien, first officer. together they'd become the best star team in the fleet, able to take on anything in the universe. whew. space. space. [ male announcer ] download zeebox free, and let your tv go where it's never gone before. [ male announcer ] start with nothing, build a ground-breaking car. good. now build a time machine. go here, find someone who can build a futuristic dash board display. bring future guy back. watch him build a tft display like nothing you've ever seen. get him to explain exactly what that is. the thin film transistor display... [ male announcer ] mmm, maybe not. just show it. customize the dash, give it park assist. the fuel efficiency flower thing.

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now that debate season is over and we have entered the final stretch of the campaign, you can expect to see schedules that defy human capability. president obama is embarking on a two-day around the clock campaign blitz across six battleground states. he will campaign in six states in just two days. while he's in between state, he will be calling voters from air force one. it's that time in the campaign. today president obama was in florida and in ohio. he was mining last night's debate for stump speech possibilities. >> if you say that you love american cars during a debate but you wrote an article titled "let detroit go bankrupt," you might have romnesia.

if you talk about how much you love teachers during a debate but said just a few weeks ago that we shouldn't hire anymore because they won't grow the economy, what do you have? i bet you got some romnesia. >> the the obama campaign reached into virginia as well today where bruce springsteen campaigned for the president by way of a e free concert. a free get out the vote concert. romney's stops included nevada and colorado. he will touch down in four states by the end of the day thursday. today he also talked to supporters in henderson, nevada, about how much he thinks the debates helped him.

>> my guess is you had the the chance to watch that debate last night, maybe a couple of the debates. and these debates have super charged our campaign. there's no question about it. we're seeing more and more enthusiasm, more and more support, we're going to make sure that these campaigns and the message of these debates keep going across the country. >> one piece of beltway wisdom that's true for a change is that you can tell where the campaign's think the campaign is being fought by looking at where they put the candidates. when they have very limited time and need to make triage decisions about where to go and not to go. by that measure, this is the battleground map as seen by the battleground map as seen by the obama campaign. these are the six states the president will be visiting in the next two days. and this is the battleground map from the romney campaign. this is where mitt romney will

be campaigning. so that's one blunt way to tell where the race is coming down to from the different campaigns perspective. if you ask the polling firms, nbc made a decision to pair down its map of the battleground states from nine states to seven states. nbc dropped north carolina off the map of battlegrounds. and they dropped nevada off the battleground list into the democrat column. with the race this close, this late, is there anything else that might move the dial? last night's debate was the last big event in the campaign before election day. a snap poll of voters showed obama winning by an eight-point margin. a cbs poll of undecided voters showed the president winning by a 30-point margin. one blog shows the big picture effect of the debates on this point in the campaign. this is their graph over time

showing each candidate's chance of winning. you can see after the first debate at the beginning of october, president obama's chances of winning went down at that point. romney's chances went up. you can see the president's chances improving again and romney's declining after the second debate in the middle of october. will obama's win last night help him further in the polls? his campaign marathon help get the bump? nate silver today did underscore how important even a small post debate bump could be in deciding the election. nate says, if mr. obama's head to head polling were two points higher, he could be a considerably clearer winner. a one-point bounce would bring him to 80%. so it's time to wait and watch the polls. but there is another measure we can look at right now.

something that's not predicted. it's not about the future. it's something that is concrete about what is already done. what is already locked in. and we have got that empirical measure of what's going on in this race here next, exclusively. busy in here. yeah. progressive mobile is... [ "everybody have fun tonight" plays ] really catching on! people can do it all! get a quote, buy and manage your policy! -[ music stops ] -it's great! well, what's with the... -[ music resumes ] -music? ♪ have fun tonight dude. getting a car insurance quote. i'll let it go to voicemail. [ clears throat ] ♪ everybody wang chung tonight ♪ putting it on vibrate. [ cell phone vibrates ] -[ loud vibrating ] -it'll pass. [ vibrating continues ] our giant store and your little phone. that's progressive mobile. i wish my patients could see what i see. ♪ that over time, having high cholesterol and any of these risk factors can put them at increased risk

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we make things you didn't even know you wanted. like a spoon fork. spray cheese. and jeans made out of sweatpants. so grab yourself some new prilosec otc wildberry. [ male announcer ] one pill each morning. 24 hours. zero heartburn. satisfaction guaranteed or your money back. in reporting on efforts to make it hard tore vote and harder to register to vote over the course of this past year or two, we found we're seeing a lot of confusing data about who actually has been able to register. especially in the swing states this year. a producer on this show decided that she was going to crunch the numbers herself. she went state by state through the swing states calling the states directly and getting the data from the state election offices. this is what she found. in colorado, a large latino population, this is how many new voters signed up as democrats in 2008 looking at the period from january to october.

this is how many new voters signed up as republicans in the the same time period in 2008. a big advantage for the democrats. just colossal. that was 2008 in colorado. now look at what has happened in the same time span this year in 2012. democrats have improved their number some over even what they had in 2008. look at the republicans. the republicans in colorado, they improved their numbers a lot. the democrats have lost the colossal part of what had been their colossal advantage in new voter registration in colorado. let's go to iowa. look at this. from january to october, that sweet spot again in 2008, new democratic registrations outpaced republican registrations in iowa by almost 8 to 1. look at 2012. look at the difference. that's negative.

look at those numbers. that's 0 in the middle. where did all the democrats go? the democrats have lost, not gained, lost almost 23,000 new registrants this year. meanwhile republicans are basically puttering along same as they ever did. but when you compare them with the democrats, quite a different margin. definitely enough to wipe out the democrats advantage and then some. in florida last time, january through september, democrats signed up almost half a million new voters. florida republicans, less than half that in 2008. but this time around, florida republicans changed the rules and passed a new law that makes it tougher to hold registration drives. it had a huge effect on the number of new democratic registrations. republicans found their numbers dropping too, but not by nearly so much. the new gap that helped the democrats so much in florida in 2008 is all but closed.

but in all those states, democrats say they are not worried about those numbers. why not? joining us now is the executive director of the party. thank you for joining us. do we have audio and i can't hear it? we've got an audio difficulty that is apparently solvable. we'll take a quick break. ♪ these are... [ male announcer ] marie callender's puts everything you've grown to love about sunday dinner into each of her pot pies. tender white meat chicken and vegetables in a crust made from scratch. marie callender's. it's time to savor.

after a brief technical difficulty, which we have conquered, joining us is the executive director of the florida democratic party. i'm very sorry for that awkward introduction. thank you for joining us. >> no problem. >> we got these numbers from florida state government showing that the historic democratic advantage in voter registration from 2008 is much, much, much reduced in 2012. do the numbers look right to you? and how do you feel about them? >> they do look about right. the republican governor rick scott and the legislature tried to criminalize voter registration. so you did have a lot of groups like the legal women voters who basically said they had to get out of the voter registration business. you see that reflecting a lot of

the numbers. but that's not the approach we took. together with with the obama campaign, we have done an aggressive effort over the last year and outregistered republicans eight months in a row. we have seen that number grow. so we really feel good about the last 12 months and where we ended up. >> in terms of the change in the law, it was a judge who blocked that law as of august. then it was catch up time once registration drives were relegalized in florida. why is it that the florida democratic party would be more, sort of, dependent on or at least attractive to new-ly registered voters than the republican party is? >> where we have seen our great gains is latino voters and that's obvious with the president's message with the dream act. it was opening up our country

and attracting them greatly in the cuban community, puerto rican community. all the hispanic communities. young people, african-american. if you look at the subsets, the women voters, young voters, our margins are about 30 points over republicans. it's about the message that the president has been giving. we do see that every month. >> early voting begins in florida this saturday, is that right? >> right. this saturday. >> in 2008 we know floridians waited hours in some cases for the chance to early vote. not just election day lines, but early voting lines. this time around the legislature cut the days for early voting by quite a bit. can you as a political party make it any easier for people to just go through the voting process this year? can you do anything at this point to make it so people aren't dissuaded by long lines? >> absolutely. one thing we have done this year in particular is a huge absentee push by the obama campaign and the party here. for the first time ever,

democrats have gone over a million requests here in florida. that's a historical landmark for us. that's so we can get more people voting by mail so less lines. we have decided we're not going to whine about the change in the law. we're going to do something about it. >> we have been getting ballots in people's hands now so they get turned in so when we get to saturday, we can go right into the process. >> does that also account for some of the super long ballots we're seeing this year in florida? we sent away to get sample ballots. ten-page long ballots with the long voter initiatives on them. a report out of tallahassee that said absentee voters are taking eight minutes to fill out the ballot. could that be causing bottlenecks at the polls? any thoughts about that? >> absolutely. the republicans loaded up the ballot with 12 amendments. that's why it's important for folks to vote by mail.

encourage people to go early so they can get in line and vote. when they vote earlier, they can take longer at the polls. our job is to educate folks. it is a long ballot. >> scott arceneaux. thank you for your time tonight sir. good luck. >> thank you. >> so florida obviously is still home to most of the nation's alligator drive stolen car or kidnapping type of news story. florida is also famously home to a lot of the nation's shady politics news story. this year florida has competition from a state you would not expect it from.

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let's invest in our teachers so they can inspire our students. let's solve this. congratulations. they started early voting yesterday in the crucial swing state of colorado. we have seen long lines in other states this week, but in colorado a lot of people vote by mail, so the polls were not too crowded. which is awesome, especially for colorado, where so much about voting has not gone awesomely this year. like this summer for instance. where they launched a voter registration drive. it was the digest in the state's history. they just finished the website now you can become a voter by using your smart phone and ipad to register like you see in these ads that were made by the state. and when you invite millions of people to become voters, some of

them will actually try to become voters. some of them will even try to do it the way you showed them to on the smart phones. but look at how that turned out when people actually tried to do it. the state website for signing up that way did not work correctly. it did not work correctly for more than ten days. a software glitch made it so that 800 people's registrations did not go through. and they didn't go through in such a way that it was 800 people who thought they registered online with the state, but the state screwed it up and it didn't work and those 800 people were not in fact registered. don't worry, said secretary of state scott gessler. everybody just go over to make sure you're registered. the deadline for doing that was tuesday october 9th. and in the predawn hours of that deadline day, we started hearing from viewers of this show who live in colorado, people e-mailing us on that last day, you can make sure the state's

screwed up system registered you, the last day you could fix that, the last day you could register to vote period in that swing state, colorado, and on that last day, this is what the state's website looked like. a picture of mr. scott gessler and this message. we regret that we have experienced intermittent technical difficulties with online voter registration. so on the last day you could register to vote. last day you could fix your registration, people coming to the official state website to try to fix that, could not register to vote. could not fix it. the republican secretary of state's office blamed the crashing website on incredibly high traffic. that they of course asked for, but they then did not prepare for. and that seems to be a sign of how things are going in the great state of colorado this year under the leadership of republican secretary of state scott gessler. just the day before the voter

registration website pooped out there, the guy whose picture is at the top of that pooped out website, the republican secretary of state, he received a letter from local election officials around his state. the colorado county clerk's association wrote to mr. gessler to sound an alarm over what they called a series of errors and oversights by his office. the clerk said they were not sure exactly how to print the ballots this year. they had not been advised of how to do that. they expressed concerns about the way a voter registration melee had been handled. they said they were quite worried about the online registration system that had lost hundreds of registrations because then what happens when the trusting woold-be voter shows up at the polls thinking he or she registered but the system ate it.

after the deadline, the clerks were facing a back log of 35,000 new registrations, many of them from the last day that you could register. in colorado, this is just the view from here, but your election system looks like kind of a mess this year. and it's not like we didn't see it coming. republican secretary of state scott gessler started making headlines last year when he tried to stop mailing ballots to every voter who normally gets one. last month he again ordered the clerk in denver to not mail ballots the way she usually does. this summer with the election looming, mr. gessler launched a new purge of the voter rules. he challenged the registrations of colorado voters. 14 people ended up getting taken off the rolls. none of them had actually voted. now scott gessler is waiting on the results of another round of purchase.

where he's checking up on 2,000 of those same voters again. and scott gessler served as the featured speaker for the tea party poll watcher's vote true the vote. colorado, your elections are such a mess that you are on the verge of being famous for that. this op-ed appeared in "the washington post" quote, could colorado be another florida. could colorado screw it up for the whole country? could scott gessler be this year's kathryn harris? it's a good question. 14 days left. and then it is too late just to ask the question. 14 days left and then it is too late just to be worried about it. that does it for us tonight. we will see you again tomorrow night. now it's time for "the last word" with lawrence o'donnell. have a great night.