Voters are coming out to the polls as I write this. They opened a little more than an hour ago on the east coast, at 6 am. Turnout is expected to be at record numbers today, although it is raining in Ohio and western Pennsylvania. High turnout is usually good for the Democrats.

A look at www.electoral-vote.com at the start of election day paints an excellent picture for Kerry: he wins, 298 to 231. His leads in Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa have solidified beyond a 5-point lead, much more of the northeast has gone dark blue, and Ohio and Pennsylvania are both leaning his way, by 2 and 4 points respectively.

Ohio, however, got a setback as the 6th Circuit Court overturned by 2-1 a prior decision to block GOP “observers” from issuing tens of thousands of challenges at Democrat-heavy polling places, potentially allowing them to abuse their power and jam up the polling places where Kerry is most heavily supported. Democrats hope to get the Supreme Court to act on this, and fast. I wouldn’t have thought there would be enough time for that, but then again I did not think the GOP would have enough time to appeal, either. We can only pray that the GOP won’t be successful in their attempts at intimidation or polling-place slowdowns. Meanwhile, you can keep up with all the Ohio vote suppression news at this site.

In the meantime, conservatives are already positioning themselves to blame a variety of people and/or factors for Bush’s possible defeat. The right-wing Washington Times is already blaming the U.N. for releasing the information about the looted explosives. Instapundit, a right-wing blogger is already blaming the mythical “liberal media” (yeah, right, that’s a laugh). My own suspicion is that the right-wingnuts are going to use those bogus “undeliverable mail” lists, claiming that if Kerry wins key swing states by less than 35,000 votes, it’ll be because Democrats cheated, and so the election would be stolen.

So let’s hope for a Kerry to win big through unexpectedly high–and relatively under-polled–youth, minority, and general Democratic votes.

Get out there and vote! I shouldn’t have to tell you to vote for Kerry, if you’ve been reading this blog and keeping an eye on reality lately, it should be blindingly obvious by now.