Seen in the Sacramento Bee:
Super Tuesday seems long gone as the nation turns its hungry eyes to the next round of presidential primaries – but for nearly a million Californians, the votes they cast in the presidential primary are yet to be counted.[...]
Statewide, Weir said, most of the uncounted votes – about 600,000 – are absentee ballots turned in on election day. Still to be vetted, he reckons, are 400,000 provisional ballots, which typically are valid about 85 percent of the time.
He estimates 10,000 more uncounted ballots are damaged: shredded in the mail, mutilated in vote-counting machines, or gummed up by sloppy voters who dribbled coffee or ketchup on their absentee ballots. Election workers must pry them open, try to figure out the voter’s intention, and then create a fresh ballot to feed into the machine.
Note to self: California is not Florida.
The reason that the trivia of California’s vote-count still not being complete isn’t really trivial is a reflection of the closeness of the Democratic nomination race. This cycle, for Obama and Hillary, every single delegate matters, and it seems that a few California delegates may hang in the balance of all these yet-to-be-counted votes.
1 response so far ↓
1 Cahwyguy // 16 Feb 2008 at 10:24 am
Then, of course, there was the problem in LA county for the “Decline to State” voters. Their ballot had you fill a bubble for Independent or Democratic (they couldn’t vote republican), and then vote your candidates. There was a furor because folks forget the first bubble. Look it up in the LA Times for details.