Tuesday, December 14, 2004

Recounts R Us, Continued

Heard a funny story on the radio this morning. Yesterday, North Carolina cast its 16 electoral votes for George W. Bush. Trouble is, NC only has 15 electoral votes. Yet another case of vote fraud favoring the Republicans! The Raleigh News & Observer has a story on it here.

The Ohio recount is underway in Cincinnatti. The Cinn City Enquirer has a brief but illuminating story about how the process will work -- 3 percent of ballots will be chosen at random and recounted in each precinct, and if the totals don't match up, all the ballots will be recounted. If the latter occurs, don't expect any results before xmas. By 10 am yesterday, they'd already found two (minor) discrepancies. Tune in next week for "The Return of the Hanging Chad."

In Washington state, election officials have discovered 561 absentee ballots that were erroneously rejected and will now be added to the recount totals. For those of you keeping score at home, Republican candidate Dino Rossi lead Demo Christine Gregoire by 261 votes at the end of regulation, and by just 42 votes after a mandatory mechanical recount. In the ongoing manual recount, Rossi has so far gained votes and leads by 88. The missing 561 ballots are all from Demo-centric Kings county, which went for Gregoire by 57 to 43 percent. Don't bother whipping out your calculators, the Seattle Post Intelligencer has already done the math: If that ratio holds, Gregoire will gain 79 votes, giving Rossi just a 9 vote lead as we head into the fourth quarter. However, the Demos failed to persuade the referees (aka the state supreme court) to allow the counting of some 2000 additional rejected absentee ballots. This one looks like it's coming down to the wire folks. And look--the crowd is doing The Wave!








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