From the political blog on the Spokesman Review!
Christine Gregoire’s strongest county, King County, will announce within half an hour that it had thousands more uncounted votes than expected. Elections officials there started today thinking they had up to 11,000 votes left to count.
If true, this would still not be enough to project to a Gregoire victory, but GOP chair Chris Vance says it all: “That changes the race dramatically… I was much more confident this morning.”
Are these ballots real?
(I also stuck up for you on http://www.soundpolitics.com before I zipped over here)
Over 10% of the new ballots do not have a governor’s vote. 16,871 people voted in President’s race in the King Ballots released. Yet 14,989 people voted in Governor’s race.
King County’s voters are not going downballot.
Yes, the ballots are real. King County dropped 17,000 ballots into the count today, and reports 4000 more to go.
Real in what sense? I’ve counted ballots and all I can say, (well, it’s not ALL I can say) is that it’s easy to tell the difference between 11,000 and 21,000 ballots.
I find it amusing at all the amateurish efforts to predict this election. In order to even a remotely responsible job, you would need to have confidence in the # of ballots to count but would also have to know the count of what type of vote remains to be counted (Military, late mail, provisional etc.). My neighbor pulled the number Rossi by 188 out of his derriere over a week ago. How did he know???
Good points, Al. But I trust statistics (yes, I’ve heard the cliche). It’s over. And frankly, we need better ways of tracking ballots because this is nuts.
Enough fuming. That said, here’s a thought:
“Everyone with a computer is a statistician, and everyone with a mouth is a pundit.”
— Gregoire campaign consultant Christian Sinderman from the Spokane Spokesman-Review Olympia blog.
I’ll bet the ballots counted today did not include those provisional ballots tracked down by Paul Berendt this weekend…you know, the ones that made him cry. Trust me those ballots will swing bigtime to the D’s. I can just hear Berendt, who professes to want every vote counted, when he tracks down one of these knuckleheads who cannot remember where they vote…”Hello, this is Paul calling…did you by any chance vote for Dino Rossi or Chris Gregoire?? If you tell us, we will enter you into a lottery where the first prize is $1 million!!! What, you voted for Rossi?? This is just a prank call!!!
–CLICK!–
I’ve never claimed these projections aren’t amateurish… only that given the information available, the math is sound. Still, a lot of people are coming to this web site for the numbers, so who am I to deny them?
FYI, of the 16,992 counted in King County today, 12,317 were provisional ballots.
Thank God. Lucky break.
This is exactly why I avoid trying to guess or predict the winner of the race…it ain’t over until it’s over.
Looks like Gregoire is now up by ~160…interesting: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/.....20Governor
How many provisionals are left of the 4000??
My thought is those 982 that were already rejected….any of those Berendt tracked down would not have been counted yet.
I doubt that, Al. I figure some of them would be. My 2 cents.
I just read an interesting (and hopefully) correct comment by Jim King at SoundPolitics.com’s latest posting that said in brutal summary the magically appearing ballots are provisional. Therefore they have a paper trail. IF and a big IF that’s the case, then I retract and apologize for making statements questioning the legitimacy of the election.
If I made an estimate that was that much off I would be unemployed fast. To miss by that much is just half assed. Heads should roll.
It appeared on the news (Alphabet networks) that the Democrats were taking signature-lacking ballots door-to-door in an attempt to get a proper signature. I’m not trying to be dense or cynical, but why is this allowed. It seems to be that once a ballot leaves election HQ the possibility of tampering increases exponentially.
Rae- hey, think a bit more. No ballots went anywhere. Paperwork to address the spoiled signature issue was politely delivered to people so thy could correct real mistakes, and of course, under the supervision of the Sec of State and a judge. I appreciate the fear of lettng ballots out of the ballot center. THAT was not done. The labor intensive project of either party or independents that result in more votes counted deserve lots of applause.- GO get those votes in the count. This is rea Northwest democracy – not Ohio or Florida fix the vote stuff. Rudy
Rudy, thank you for telling me what the Dems were carrying around. On the news reports it just wasn’t clear (to me) what they were hauling from door to door. Of course, I was HOPEFUL it wasn’t the actual ballots…but you never know these days!