The nation has just gotten behind Obama, that's not it. Martin only did so well because Obama did excellent in Georgia. Without Obama, the November 4th senate election would have been a blowout in favor of Chambliss.
http://www.twincities.com/allheadlines/ci_11129187?nclick_check=1 Minneapolis discovery costs Franken 36 votes What Maplewood giveth, Minneapolis taketh away. Elections officials in Minnesota's largest city today discovered that one precinct came up 133 ballots short of election day totals, resulting in a net loss for Democratic challenger Al Franken of 36 votes. The development wipes away what had been a boon for Franken in his bid to overtake Republican U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman, after Ramsey County officials found an additional 37 votes for Franken from a Maplewood precinct on Tuesday. Minneapolis elections director Cindy Reichert said she believes the error occurred when election judges at the precinct on election night mistakenly ran ballots with write-in candidates through a counting machine twice. There were 129 such ballots. Reichert said although the numbers do not match exactly, she is confident that that's what happened and will report those numbers to the Secretary of State's Office. She also detailed a search for any potential missing envelopes that contain ballots, including opening the counting machine, talking to election judges and calling the church where the polling place was located. "We believe that we have all the ballot envelopes here," Reichert said. "There are human errors that are made on election day."
With that, Coleman moves into the position of a slight favorite to win the recount. Reichert backed off the double counting theory. They think they lost those ballots, maybe someone stole them, who knows. It really shouldn't be this hard to count votes.
I have no idea what a Saxby Chambliss is, what it does, but I would never endorse anything or anyone with a name that stupid-sounding. Sounds like maybe a designer bathroom faucet?
Barack Obama might look a bit pretentious by taking this "Office of the President-Elect" crap too far, while appointing the ultimate Washington insiders to plum positions in his cabinet, therefore contradicting his message of fundamentally changing "broken" Washington.... But Saxby Chambliss was going to win anyway. BTW: Sarah Palin proved during her campaign stop why she's still a rock star.
The guy at 538.com points out that if all the write-in ballots were run through twice, you'd have an even number of write-in votes, and they don't. They've backed away from that claim and the ballots are just missing again.
