Waxing nostalgic about chads

You would think with advancements in voting technology, we wouldn’t have election officials reading tea leaves of voter intent to determine the outcome of a recount.

Yet, pregnant and hanging chads have merely evolved to smudges, X’s and dots. This short blog post by the L.A. Times gives ample illustration to the tussle in St. Paul, which will determine the Senate race between Norm Coleman and Al Franken.

I think it’s pretty obvious that Voter #1 wanted Coleman, Voter #2 wanted Franken and Voter #3 wanted the independent candidate Dean Barkley.

In the first case, you have the circle filled in and X’ed. A partisan poster said that the X meant it was crossing it out, but this is silly. They would’ve crossed out the name if they’d made that big of mistake. Obviously, they just fudged on how to fill out the bubble.

In the second case, the Franken bubble is completely filled in while Barkley has just a dot. Obviously, they wanted Franken.

In the third case, they smeared out the vote for Franken because they wanted Barkley. All very clear.

Of course, it kind of does give way too much subjectivity to these election officials.

This poster says it best:

Here is my call on these ballots.

1. This person filled in the oval, indicating that he had voted for Coleman in the last election; but then crossed it out with an X showing that he now wanted Coleman to be an eX-Senator. I interpret this as a vote for Franken.

2. This is a very shrewd “stealth” vote. The voter filled in the oval for Franken so that the voting machine would read it as a vote for Franken, all the while knowing that in a recount, the canvassing committee would eventually award it to his first choice, Barkley. A true pre-cog.

3. This person filled in the oval next to Barkley just to get the pen working, but when they went to vote for Franken, it had almost completely run out of ink. My call: Franken.

Here comes Santa Claus

For a governor with a 13 percent approval rating, Rod Blagojevich has been smiling lately. Since Illinois’ junior senator, Barack Obama was elected president and subsequently resigned from his congressional seat, Rod gets to pick someone to fill out his term.

He said yesterday that he’s “giving away a Senate seat for Christmas.” Whose house will Santa Blago be flying to, so that he can deliver the present through the chimney?

Obviously, it will be a Democrat, and my odds are on either Jesse Jackson, Jr., or Emil Jones, who will act as a placeholder. But just about everyone wants the job, and I wouldn’t put it past the deluded governor to appoint an opponent so that he, in his mind, will remove the competition for a third term.

Blagojevich is very lucky Illinois has no recall law.

Vice-president-elect Joe Biden’s replacement has already been named, his chief of staff while he was in the Senate. Ted Kaufman will take that spot. He’ll probably only serve as a placeholder, perhaps until Joe’s son, Beau Biden, returns from service in the Middle East, and can take the spot in 2010. Obama’s seat would’ve been up in 2010, anyway, but Biden was just re-elected. Still, an appointment is only good till the next congressional election.

Missouri flies behind the canary

The final electoral votes, 11 from Missouri were called yesterday, pushing John McCain to 173, as Missouri appears to have lost its bellwether status. This is only the second time in the past 100 years that Missouri voted for the loser, and since this was not a very close election, and it still couldn’t pick the winner, it may be hard to use Missouri as an indicator in the future.

If Barack Obama couldn’t win this state, what Democrat could except in landslides?

I think Missouri is trending strongly Republican as the two parties remake themselves. The southern part of the state is increasingly evangelical, and the Democratic Party is becoming less reliant on blue-collar whites, which are disappearing as a group, anyway. Missouri lacks the progressive tradition of the Upper Midwestern states, and it is not doing well enough economically to attract a Democratic professional class.

Missouri, as any reader of Mark Twain knows, was a slave state, and almost joined the Confederacy. Today, it looks southward, more akin to Arkansas than Obama’s homestate, Illinois to its east.

Ballot Issues: Ohio

The Democrats advanced their Senate advantage to 58 seats in the Senate today, as convicted felon Ted Stevens finally succumbed to defeat in Alaska. That race was very close, and along with the popularity of Sarah Palin, it’s a wonder what it really takes for someone to get elected or unelected up there.

But the two undecided races in the Midwest, the Minnesota Senate seat and the Columbus House seat, remain just that, undecided.

I thought I would look back and analyze the state ballot measures in each of the Midwestern states, starting with Ohio. I voted in Oregon, actually, and I can say that the 15 ballot measures they had out there really could’ve been as important as any race between two candidates.

Ohio had five ballot measures. The first four passed, but the last one, and most controversial one, Issue 6 (there was no Issue 4) to build a casino outside Wilmington, Ohio, failed. This is the fourth time since 1990 gamblers have tried to come to the state, one of the few left with absolutely no casino.

The Columbus Dispatch gave a kudos to voters, and I’d tend to agree. Casinos are mostly just bad news, and this has been turned down time and again. Issue 5 beat back the attempts of slimy payday lenders to overturn consumer protections against usury, despite a reportedly heavy ad campaign. Could these payday lenders have any more shame given the economic collapse based on failed credit? I haven’t heard of a link, but I bet it’s out there.

Issue 2 expands the sensible Clean Ohio Fund, which cleans up brownfields in this Rust Belt state. This would create green-collar jobs while restoring Ohio, which has its share of environmental shames. (q.v. burning Cuyahoga River)

Issue 3 affirms the rights of property owners to the water flowing under and around the property. This is typically protected common law in the East, but in the West, landowners would have no such right. It makes me think could be really important if a bottled water scam, such as took place in Georgia a few years back.

Issue 1 I’m less enthusiastic about, but it basically just sets clearer deadlines for ballot initiatives and requires that they be filed four months before the election. I’m mixed on ballot measures. I like to believe in direct democracies and think voters should have more of a say then they do in many cases, but at the same time, the process can be abused. Good luck on this.

Change in leadership?

My old congressman from college, John Boehner, is the House Minority Leader. He took over after Tom DeLay was ousted. He is a staunch conservative from a staunchly conservative district between Cincinnati and Dayton.

But the Republicans, who lost about three dozen seats last election, lost another 20 to 25 seats on Nov. 4, and they are looking for someone to blame or someone to give them a new direction. Many of the representatives in the House Republican leadership have stepped aside, but Boehner has not. Not yet.

But he’s getting a challenge on the right, by Rep. Dan Lungren of California.It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out for the region. Boehner seems fairly ideologically pure. Despite the large number of automobile manufacturing jobs, he joined other conservatives (unlike Ohio’s Republican senator, George Voinovich) to oppose a bailout for GM, Ford and Chrysler, saying they caused their own problem.

The Dems hold a 51-39 advantage in the Midwestern states in House seats, with slight majorities in each state except Missouri, which is also the only state Obama lost (although votes are still being counted there and some news outlets are waiting to call it.). It has been noted elsewhere that New England doesn’t have a single Republican congressman left. While nothing so drastic occurred here, the GOP lost its majorities in both Michigan and Ohio. Pending the outcome of that uncalled election in Columbus, Ohio, the Buckeye state will either have an even delegation or a 10-8 Democratic majority. Just a few years ago, the Republicans outnumbered the Dems 2 to 1 in the state.

The most prominent Democratic congressman from the Midwest has to be Rahm Emanuel of Chicago. He was just named chief of staff for Obama, who until today was the Midwest’s most prominent senator.

Still counting votes for Congress

Across the country, three Senate races and five races in the House are still undecided, here more than a week after the election. (In the presidential race, Missouri, although leaning towards John McCain, also has not been called.)

The two closest races for Congress are both in the Midwest — the Senate race in Minnesota and the House race for Ohio’s 15th district, a gerrymandered seat that includes 1/3 of liberal Columbus, some moderate suburbs and a good deal of very conservative farmland west of Columbus.

The House race in Ohio is unexpectedly close. An open seat, the Democrat in the race, Mary Jo Kilroy, very nearly upset the incumbent two years ago. Back for a second go-around, Kilroy is down by 146 votes to Republican Steve Stivers, a political novice.

Stivers: 130,282 votes (106,697 Franklin + 9363 Madison + 14222 Union)

Kilroy: 130,136 votes (118,645 Franklin + 5014 Madison + 6477 Union)

 

Still to be counted are 27,000 provisional ballots, which may or may not count (I read earlier that usually about half of these ballots are ruled invalid). But even stranger, there are 750 absentee ballots that were filled out incorrectly, missing a signature, Social Security number or a driver’s license number. The Democratic Secretary of State has the election board calling up these voters so that they can get a second chance to complete their forms! And the Republicans, so far, are not complaining about this.

In Minnesota, comedian Al Franken trails the incumbent Republican Norm Coleman by about 200 votes, out of 3 million cast. Coleman asked Franken to step aside so the healing could begin. Franken said, not so much, let’s have a recount. Gail Collins, ever-spirited, wrote about this continued election excitement in today’s column.

Omaha for Obama

Adding injury to insult, and flying well under the radar, it seems John McCain will not even win all of Nebraska, a seemingly very red state.

Obama, campaigned briskly in Omaha, a city only one letter different from his own name and next door to the state that did the most for his campaign — Iowa.

Nebraska awards its electoral votes proportionately by district, and it appears four will be going to McCain, but the fifth vote goes to Obama. Which, just like Indiana, has a unique appeal to the man from Illinois and went for a Democrat for the first time in 44 years, since my mother was an infant.

The Republican Party has a lot of soul-searching and explaining to do when something like this happens.

And in the end…

Obama all but swept the Midwest and its 86 electoral votes, knocking out the old blue states and reaching into Ohio and Indiana. Right now, it looks like he’ll lose Missouri, which is worth 11 electoral votes, by a few thousand votes, but it hasn’t been called yet.

Most impressive is the win in Indiana, even if by a single percentage point. I wonder what the Republicans must be thinking, how that state got away from them. No Democrat had won it since Johnson’s landslide in 1964, but no Democrat had really tried, either.

Lake County, next door to Chicago, did the job of putting the state over the top for Obama, according to the Tribune. The heavily African-American county was the center of some controversy over early voting, as noted in this blog.

President Barack Hussein Obama

Erin and I were lined up all the way in back, at the Field Museum, as far as they lined people up before they started letting people in. All up and down Michigan Avenue, entrepreneurs hawked everything from T-shirts to bottled water, “from Obama’s refrigerator.”

It didn’t take long to win this one. We got to where we decided to stand at about 9:45 p.m., a few minutes later, Virginia was called for Obama. Then at 10 p.m., the entire West Coast came in for Obama, pushing him over the 300 mark. The wails went up. America had just elected a president with a background like no other.

Live from Phoenix, we were fed a feed of McCain’s very honorable, concilitaory concession speech. Which I think says something else great about America, even in loss, the other side still sees itself with the winners, as Americans. No riots. No disputes. Other than the mention of Sarah Palin, the crowd clapped for the senator from Arizona.

Then out came an African-American bishop to give the invocation, then another man led the pledge of allegiance, then a woman sang the national anthem. A few recorded songs to get the crowd fired up “Only in America,” country, then a song from the Delta Blues, then Jackie Wilson’s Keep on Lifting me Higher.

Then the new first family, Sasha, Malia, Michelle and Barack. Two precious little black girls, and a beautiful African-American woman. A first family both completely unlike and completely quintessentially like everyone’s image of the first family.

Barack. Once again an orator among orators.

Then we were done by 11:30. In time for the evening news. So different then the other two presidential elections of my adulthood. A skyscraper on the Streeterville peninsula had its interior lights lit to USA. The Sears Tower shined red, white and blue. A man was standing up flashing his American passport, feeling good to be American again.

Through the canyons of the Loop, a wail circulated through the sea of people surreally taking over the streets, walking down Michigan Avenue because they could. One guy climbed up on the lions in front of the Art Institute.

Martin Luther King foretold of this day, when a man would clearly be judged not by the color of his skin but by the content of his character. I thought of Rep. John Lewis, in Atlanta, wishing he could’ve been on stage with Obama.

Say what you will about those progressive European countries, we have much that we could and should adopt from them.

But tonight, tonight, could have happened – only in America.

Big turnout in Gary

My source in the Obama Gary headquarters, Regina Cossey, said the turnout has been huge in Lake County and Gary, especially with early voting.

At 3 p.m., she expected the lines only to get longer. Polls there closed at 6 p.m. — 20 minutes ago.

Obama’s chances in Indiana?

“I am very optimistic. There is no doubt it’s a very tough road in Indiana. Indiana’s as red as it gets,” Cossey said. “We are very optimistic because there has been large voter turnout.”

So far, with few urban counties and only 9 percent in, McCain is holding onto a thin lead in Indiana. 131,400 to 129,100.

She said polling went off smoothly, but at least in one precinct in west Gary, the Concord Commons, several voters turned up who were registered in the computer, but not in the local precinct book.