Republican unwillingness to have eVoting paper trail — will give Senate control to the Democrats
Jim Webb, the Democratic candidate for Senate in
Virginia who leads Senator George Allen, a Republican, by about 7,000 votes,
began planning his transition to the Senate Wednesday, confident that the margin
would survive state scrutiny or any legal challenge, aides said.
Victory courtesy of the Republican machines
Jim Webb, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Virginia who leads Senator George Allen, a Republican, by about 7,000 votes, began planning his transition to the Senate Wednesday, confident that the margin would survive state scrutiny or any legal challenge, aides said.
If the Webb victory holds up, it will provide the final seat Democrats need to take control of the Senate. With Jon Tester, a Democrat, unseating Senator Conrad Burns, an incumbent Republican in Montana, the Democrats are now one seat short of a 51-49 majority.
“The bottom line is the votes have been counted and Jim Webb has won,” said Kristian Denny Todd, a Webb aide. “It could have gone the other way, but it didn’t. We’re on top and that’s the way it’s going to stay.” She said that “Senator-elect Webb” is consulting with advisers and planning to take his Senate seat in January.
All of [this] occurs in relatively uncharted legal territory where it is unclear what a recount really means in jurisdictions where there is no paper trail and where the actual number of eligible provisional ballots remains in flux.
Barring surrender by one side, it looked like a drawn-out process could extend into December.
The recount is unlikely to resolve all the potential legal issues. In Virginia, “recounts” consist of re-tabulating the votes from the existing counts to ensure that the end-of-the-day tallies were summed accurately. Virginia uses a mix of optical-scan machines and touch- screen machines, with 11 different systems in total, across more than 130 jurisdictions, amounting to more than 9,000 machines. Touch-screen machines print out full tallies after all voting is done, and unless these printouts are unclear, officials generally do not rerun the machines. With optical-scan machines, only unclear ballots are run back through the scanner.
The bottom line is that there aren’t individual receipts or ballots to be recounted. Virginia already went through this in a contested race — and after several weeks of whining about the mathematics of retabulating the results from the “approved” machines, the total was changed by 37 votes.
This chickens have really come home to roost on this one. The Bush government wasted $2.5 billion on the cheapest, low-bid, unverifiable solution to the question of voting procedures — and are suffering the result of their own handiwork.
Posted: Wed - November 8, 2006 at 07:13 PM