Monday,  November 5, 2012 • Vol. 13--No. 111 • 30 of 35 •  Other Editions

(Continued from page 29)

resources.
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Even in a close state, a vote's a million to 1 shot at picking president; yet voters persevere

• WASHINGTON (AP) -- There's always grousing about the many people who don't bother to vote. But look at it the other way: An estimated 133 million Americans will cast ballots in Tuesday's election. Some will persevere despite long lines, pressing personal burdens or the devastation left by Superstorm Sandy. Why do they do it?
• It's not because any one voter will decide the contest between President Barack Obama and challenger Mitt Romney.
• A one-vote win is rare even in local or state races, which attract smaller turnout. The largest numbers of voters -- about 6 in 10 eligible adults -- come out for presidential years. Yet the presidency's never turned on just one vote, not even in the 2000 recount that flummoxed Florida.
• It's so improbable that scholars debate whether voting is a rational act.
• "There is no question that from a simplistic rational view it doesn't make sense to vote," said Kevin Lanning, a political psychologist at Florida Atlantic University. "Even in Florida I'm more likely to be killed in an auto accident going to the polls than I am to cast the deciding vote in the presidential election."
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US soldier faces hearing in Afghanistan massacre; case includes blimp video, Afghan witnesses

• JOINT BASE LEWIS-McCHORD, Wash. (AP) -- The U.S. soldier accused of carrying out one of the worst atrocities of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is appearing in a military courtroom, where prosecutors will for the first time lay out their case that he slaughtered 16 people, including children, during a predawn raid on two villages in the Taliban's heartland.
• Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, a married father of two from Lake Tapps, Wash., is accused of slipping away from a remote outpost in southern Afghanistan early on March 11 with an M-4 rifle outfitted with a grenade launcher to attack the villages of Balandi and Alkozai, in the dangerous Panjwai district of Kandahar Province.
• The massacre left 16 dead -- nine of them children, and 11 of them members of the same family. Six others were wounded, and some of the bodies set afire.

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