(Washington, DC)  Civil rights triumphed over another failed attack from advocates of discrimination when today, the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics rejected a proposed referendum to put the rights of a minority up for a vote.

The proposed effort to limit the rights of District residents was brought by Stand For Marriage and Maryland pastor, Bishop Harry Jackson. The BOEE denied the referendum as a violation of the Human Rights Act of the District of Columbia.

 “Equality should never be up for debate or denied on a ballot,” said D.C. resident Michael Crawford, Co-chair of D.C. for Marriage. “We only want what every other American already has – the right to marry the person we love.”

Rev. Cedric Harmon, a D.C. resident and a representative of D.C. Clergy United for Marriage Equality, a group of nearly 200 Washington, D.C. faith leaders representing all eight wards of the District and a variety of religious faiths added the following statement in support of the BOEE’s decision:

 ”It is shameful when religious leaders fail to uphold the Christian teachings of our faith by trying to institutionalize a second-class citizenship on our neighbors. People of faith have worked for generations to achieve social justice for all people — regardless of race, creed, class, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. We serve our entire flock, and there is no justification under God that we should discriminate against any of God’s children.

“The District of Columbia has not voted on the civil rights of a minority since the Civil War, when a majority prevented freed male slaves from gaining the right to vote. Today, the Board of Elections and Ethics reminded us that human rights should never be put to a vote. As members of the clergy who support equal rights for all citizens, and who struggle to achieve social justice in the District of Columbia, we applaud the BOEE for standing up for human rights in the face of discrimination.”

The city of about 19,000, not far from Chapel Hill, is considered one of the most liberal in the South – sometimes dubbed The Paris of the Piedmont. Once a sleepy farm community It now is the home to a growing number of artists and musicians.

Alderwoman Jacqui Gist introduced the motion after California voters passed Proposition 8 which amends that state’s constitution to block same-sex marriage. North Carolina law bars gay marriage but GOP attempts to enshrine it in the state constitution have failed.

Gist said her resolution is critical of the more than 1,000 state and federal rights and benefits of marriage that are denied to gay couples.

“Whereas, the denial of such benefits has been demonstrated to have significant psychological and social impact on the physical, social, and economic well-being of gay and lesbian couples and their families; and whereas the U.S. Supreme Court recognizes marriage as one of the ‘basic civil rights of man’ fundamental to our very existence and survival” and “one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men … [be it resolved] that civil marriage for same-sex couples must include all the benefits commonly bestowed upon opposite-sex couples, including, among other rights, healthcare coverage and related decision-making, privileges under immigration and naturalization law, survivor benefits, inheritance rights, and child custody.” the resolution says.

The measure had the support of Mayor Mark Chilton who signed it.

Carrboro has had a long history of being gay-friendly. It was one of the first communities in North Carolina to offer health benefits to the same-sex partners of municipal workers. Openly gay former Mayor Mike Nelson served five terms and is now an Orange County commissioner.

North Carolina is one of the fast growing states in the country as many Northern businesses move South. That growth has seen a major increase in Democrats in North Carolina.

Despite a ban on same-sex marriage, hospitals in the state revised the Patients’ Bill of Rights in April to ensure patients can receive the visitors who matter most to them regardless of the legal status of their relationship.

The statewide rule will help ensure that same-sex partners and other loved ones will be treated the same as immediate family. The regulation, however, does not provide same-sex partners the right to make medical decisions.

Over the course of the morning the central offices have been fixing these problems one by one. As of right now, it looks like things are finally running smoothly.

Among the factors: nearly 2-to-1 support for Barack Obama among 18- to 29-year-olds and a seasoned get-out-the-vote effort that has seen young voter participation steadily rising since 2000.

An AP-Yahoo News Poll conducted earlier this month found that, among 18- to 29-year-old likely voters, 60 percent supported Obama, 33 percent John McCain and 5 percent Ralph Nader. The poll had a margin of error of 9 percentage points.

When asked, “Do any of the following words describe how you feel about the upcoming presidential election?” 61 percent of the young respondents chose “interested,” while 48 percent chose “hopeful.”

But, able to choose more than one answer, only about a third of these likely young voters said they were “excited” about the election and 47 percent were “frustrated.”

These are the sort of answers one might expect from a group of voters who’ve historically been pegged as Election Day wild cards, but who’ve also shown they can be counted on – helping get both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton elected, for instance.

Show up big this time – and they could put Obama over the top. A lesser youth showing, however, would likely benefit McCain.

“So turnout suddenly becomes a pretty big ingredient,” says Peter Levine, director of Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, otherwise known as CIRCLE.

That’s especially true in key swing states, such as Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. In North Carolina, for instance, the most recent tally available shows 579,858 new registrants who are eligible to vote this year. Many of them 20somethings, they represent about 9 percent of the state’s registered voters and could be a difference-maker in a close race, particularly if they support one candidate more heavily than another.

The huge influx of new voters is part of a larger national trend.

Rock the Vote, which focuses on young voters, has registered more than 2.3 million voters this year, compared with more than 1.4 million voters in 2004, already a standout year for youth turnout.

In that election, about 47 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds voted, up from 36 percent in 2000, according to the Census Bureau. While their impact was not felt as greatly because their vote was more evenly split between George W. Bush and John Kerry, no other age group increased its turnout by more than 5 percentage points.

And some political scientists expect those numbers to be topped yet again, especially since young voters have been a long-standing centerpiece of Obama’s campaign.

Besides college students, his supporters include people like Elvis Garcia, a 19-year-old Chicagoan who recently completed a training and education program called Jobs For Youth and is looking for employment – and a change in the country’s leadership.

“I want this time to be different,” says Garcia, who has many peers who also plan to vote.

They may be considered unlikely voters by some. But political scientist Molly Andolina expects many of them will make it to the polls in November.

“This cohort has shown a lot of resilience,” says Andolina, a professor at DePaul University who studies young-voter habits. “Prior to Obama’s win in Iowa – when it was known that he was popular among youth – pundits declared that they’d never make it out, in the cold of January, when college and universities were still on break, to spend an hour or more caucusing …

“But they did. And he won.”

Still others wonder if young voters’ support for Obama might be even stronger than the polls have been showing, since many under-30s don’t have land lines.

Because of this, Sam Wang, a professor at Princeton University who helps oversee Princeton Election Consortium, estimates that, on average, national polls could be understating Obama’s margin over McCain by about 1 percentage point.

But that’s a minor issue compared with barriers to voting some young people are facing, says Matthew Segal, the young executive director of the Student Association for Voter Empowerment.

“Young voters don’t suffer from a lack of interest. They suffer from a lack of access,” Segal says.

In this election, he’s heard complaints about everything from difficult registration requirements to fliers that falsely tell college students they’ll lose their student loans if they don’t vote in their home state.

Segal’s group, also called SAVE, was founded in reaction to voting problems college students faced in Ohio and other states in 2004. Those issues included polling facilities that had trouble handling the influx of young voters.

Students at Washington University in St. Louis were so frustrated after similar problems there that the university persuaded the county to put a polling place on campus for this election. It’ll serve about a third of students.

The university also will provide shuttles to students who vote off campus, says Jordan Aibel, a sophomore who helped lead an effort that registered an 2,000 additional students.

“There’s a tangible sense of excitement and a desire to get involved,” Aibel, an independent who’s still deciding on a candidate, says of the mood on campus.

Casby Stainback, a young Republican at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Va., who’s supporting McCain, has noted the enthusiasm, too.

She finds it encouraging, even if much of it isn’t for her candidate – and even if Obama wins.

“The more people who participate,” she says, “the better off we’ll be.”

This year offers a similar disparity between the parties. The Democrats proved at their Denver convention to be GLBT supportive while the GOP in Minneapolis will most likely rail against equality for gays in their effort to bring home their socially conservative base.

It was made clear by the major Democratic stars –Ted Kennedy, Hillary and Bill Clinton and Barak Obama — that we, the GLBT community, are included in their vision for America. In Minneapolis, I suspect the few references to the existence of GLBT people will be as a threat to the family, with some speakers explicitly calling for a federal Constitutional Amendment to prohibit equal marriage rights. It is unfathomable that a gay person – except the most delusional – would be comfortable voting for such a party, no less trolling and tripping over conservatives in the convention hall.

McCain’s first nod to the conservatives came when he plucked a tyro from the tundra to serve as his gunning mate, er, running mate. Alaska’s moose stew-loving governor, Sarah Palin, energized social conservatives who quickly aborted their ostensible concerns about national security for their narrow desire to secure the termination of Roe v. Wade. They were so thrilled to have Palin on the ticket, that the Family Research Council excused her teenage daughter, Bristol, for her out of wedlock pregnancy. Imagine the uproar from these Moral Majority types if this had instead been Chelsea Clinton!

Like a comedy sketch, John McCain’s wife, Cindy, said on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, that the inexperienced Palin was qualified to handle a resurgent Russia because, “Alaska is the closest part of our continent to Russia.” Isn’t that a bit like saying I’m an expert on Cuba because I grew up in Miami?

If Palin’s resume were any thinner, it could be a Vogue runway model. Prior to her two-year stint as Alaska’s governor, Palin was the mayor of Wasilla, an Anchorage suburb with 7,000 residents – which is probably less than the number of people who live on my block in Brooklyn.

Considering McCain is 72 and has had past health issues, Palin was a reckless and potentially ruinous choice.  McCain’s main appeal was his experience, but elevating Palin makes it infinitely more difficult for McCain to credibly make this argument.

Let’s be honest, this is tokenism and selecting Palin as a substitute for Clinton is reminiscent of President George H.W. Bush nominating Clarence Thomas as a Supreme Court replacement for the legendary Thurgood Marshall.

This pander pick will win over few Clinton supporters following her eloquent, unifying speech in Denver. It is ludicrous to think that these educated women will be enthusiastic about Palin, who is anti-choice, anti-gay, anti-environment and who even supported arch conservative Pat Buchanan’s presidential campaign. Indeed, Buchanan told Chris Matthews on Hardball that Palin was a “brigader for me in 1996.”

Unfortunately, I still get a lot of e-mail from misinformed gay people who think that John McCain and Barack Obama have the same record on GLBT issues simply because they both oppose allowing gay people to marry. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. Obama is light years ahead on our issues and a vote for McCain is a tragic mistake that will usher in four more years of discrimination and humiliation. I suggest those in doubt visit a new website, “LGBT For Obama,” that highlights the superiority of the democratic nominee’s record.

In November, we can wake up to a new day where job discrimination is outlawed, openly gay soldiers are able to serve our nation with the dignity they deserve, GLBT people are finally included in hate crime laws, our families are offered a measure of protection and America will have a moderate Supreme Court for years to come.

Or, we can rise to a dark November morning that ushers in four more ugly years of persecution, right wing demagogues on the president’s speed dial, invisibility for our families, Arabic translators kicked out of the military because of their sexual orientation and a retrograde and a reactionary Supreme Court that sets our movement back decades.

The GLBT community needs to unify and rally around the Obama campaign as we did for Clinton in 1992, or we will live in a regime that rules like its 1892. The choice for the future is clear and stark. We must mobilize in swing states and win or the GOP will be taking gratuitous swings at our families for the next four years.

Oregon counts ballots no matter what happens to the voter. So does Florida. But in South Dakota, if you die before the election, so does your vote.

Increasingly popular mail-in ballots mean voters can now choose candidates up to 60 days before an election, raising new questions about an age-old phenomenon normally associated with chicanery in places like Chicago: What should be done with the ballots of the recently dead?

Laws in at least a dozen states are evenly split between tallying and dumping the votes. No one keeps records on how often such deaths occur.

Yet in this year’s contentious campaign, the right of every American to a counted ballot has become a rallying cry – even if the voter dies before the tallying starts.

Take the case of Florence Steen, an ailing 88-year-old grandmother born before women had the right to vote. One of her last wishes was to vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton. She wanted to be part of history, said her daughter Kathy Krause.

Steen was confined to a hospice bed in Rapid City, S.D., when she was brought an absentee ballot weeks before the June 3 primary. She studied it a long time, then marked her choice with such determination her daughter feared she would poke through the paper.

Steen died on Mother’s Day. With a heavy heart, her daughter took the ballot and dropped it in a mailbox. “In my mind, her vote counted,” Krause said. “My mother believed she had voted for a woman to be president.”

But the women down at the county courthouse told Krause the ballot had to be tossed because state law declared a voter must be alive on Election Day.

So Krause passed that word to the Clinton campaign. And Clinton drew great applause when she told the story in her concession speech four days after the South Dakota primary.

“It’s just a goofy law, and it needs to be changed,” said Krause, who plans to lobby state legislators to reverse that statute just as soon as her grief eases.

“What about the soldiers in Iraq? What if they vote and they’re killed in action, God forbid? Should we take away their vote because they died for their country?”

There are no military standards governing voting by soldiers. Rather, their mailed-in ballots are counted at the individual election districts where they are registered to vote. But like civilian votes, no one keeps track of whether the ballots of soldiers are thrown out because they died after casting them.

“No one can tell you that,” said Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat, head of the Overseas Voting Foundation in Munich. “Every single election jurisdiction can do it the way it wants. And there are more than 7,000 of them.”

Thirty-one states allow some form of early voting.

Ballots cast by the dead are usually the focus of fraud allegations, as happened in Washington’s extremely tight 2004 gubernatorial race, decided by a margin of 129 votes out of 3 million cast. More than a dozen ballots were linked to dead people.

But some advocates say legitimate, mail-in votes from people who die before Election Day should be counted, particularly in rural elections, where races can hang on a handful of votes.

“In Montana, there have been several legislative seats decided by one, two, three votes,” said Tim Storey of the National Conference of State Legislatures, an organization that recently looked at 12 mostly Western states and found that half have no rules governing ballots of the deceased.

Those remaining states – Colorado, Idaho, Minnesota and Utah – demand that such ballots be rejected, leaving Montana and Oregon as the only states that count them.

South Dakota Secretary of State Chris Nelson said he doesn’t understand why a dead person’s vote should be counted.

“In my mind, it’s clear,” Nelson said. “You have to be a qualified voter on Election Day. I don’t know how someone can say you’re a qualified voter if you’re deceased.”

Pam Smith, director of the advocacy group Verified Voting, disagrees: “By definition, the day you cast a ballot is Election Day. That’s it.”

Mail-in ballots arrived in record numbers during this year’s protracted primary season.

In California’s San Diego County, for example, 45 percent of the presidential vote arrived by mail. Similar numbers surfaced across the country. Election experts have predicted that as many as 25 percent of voters will vote by mail in November.

Dan Seligson, an editor at electionline.org, a voter watchdog organization, said ballots from the recently deceased could affect the contentious presidential showdown between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain.

“It could be a great contribution to any legal challenge,” he said. “That’s what happened in 2000, when we had this perfect storm of questions about ballot counts, ballot designs, and dead voters.”