From National Journal’s Hotline:

With less than seven hours to go until the polls close in the contentious NY-09 special election, allegations of dirty tricks between Democrat David Weprin and Republican Bob Turnerare flying.

Weprin’s campaign claimed Tuesday afternoon that Turner and his GOP allies sent a 3 a.m. text message asking voters to call Weprin’s campaign headquarters to jam up his phone lines.

“It is outrageous that Bob Turner’s allies would resort to jamming our phones in an effort to prevent our campaign from contacting voters and getting out the message about how radical Bob Turner really is,” said Weprin spokeswoman Elizabeth Kerr. “Republicans participating in phone jamming in the past have landed in jail, and there must be a full investigation into the Republican phone jamming campaign.”

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Hey mom and dads, it’s election week!  Does your child like to argue?  Does he like to boss his younger siblings around?  Does he love the sound of his own voice?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, your child is a natural born politician.  Now to ensure his success in the political world, send him to Camp Politics for a three-week intensive training program:

Once he gets elected to office, the most important thing for him to learn is how to stay there.  If he does a bad job, people will want to get him out of office.  So your child will need to learn how to silence those that want to speak out against him.

Of course, this violates basic free speech rights.  But Camp Politics has figured out a sure-fire way around the First Amendment that means politics will remain a game for special interests and political insiders.

It’s called campaign finance laws.

We all know that speaking takes money.  And the only way ordinary Americans can speak out effectively about politics is to pool their resources with their friends and neighbors.  But campaign finance laws limit the amount of money people can spend on political ads and organizing and they wrap people in red tape to the point that they can’t even speak!

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Obama administration officials repeatedly denied that politics had anything to do with its Justice Department’s (DOJ) decision to abandon its lawsuit against the Black Panthers, a “civil rights” group that brandished weapons, blocked a polling station and hurled racial insults at voters on Election Day 2008. In fact, at least one Justice Department official swore to it under oath.

But according to evidence uncovered by Judicial Watch, this is yet another Obama administration falsehood.

On September 21, released a draft Vaughn index prepared by the Department of Justice (DOJ) that shows that the two top political appointees at the DOJ were involved in the decision to dismiss the voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party for Self Defense (NBPP).

The index, which we acquired pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, describes documents the government is withholding from the public. Among those documents are internal DOJ emails regarding the Black Panther case between the highest political appointees inside the DOJ, including former Deputy Attorney General David Ogden and the Associate Attorney General Thomas Perrelli, the second and third ranking officials at the DOJ.

Here’s one example: A May 10, 2009, email from Associate Attorney General Perrelli to Deputy Associate Attorney General and former Democratic election lawyer Sam Hirsh. “Where are we on the Black Panther case?” Perrelli asks in the subject header. The email also includes Deputy Attorney General Ogden’s “current thoughts on the case.”

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Today is election day in several states. Check throughout the day and night for updates and results.