Before: Totally forgot about the special election today. No biggie, the lines will probably be nonexistent even in the evening.
After: Basically no line, but there were a few people voting. The polling place volunteers were playing poker to pass the time between voters.
A few years back, some sort of registration snafu* left my name off the rolls at my polling place and I had to cast a provisional ballot. I remember being extremely unhappy that night when everyone declared the winner and I knew for a fact that my vote had not been counted. Sure, it would be eventually, but it felt like my vote didn’t matter.
Yesterday, I read that as many as 3 million mail-in and provisional ballots might remain to be counted in California. This morning, that estimate’s been revised to 1.6 million [edit: the official count is coming in at at least 2.3 million; see below]. There are a number of races, including Proposition 11, that are too close to call with that many votes still in play. It’s at least 3 times the current margin of victory for Prop 8 or margin of defeat for Prop 4. If those voters lean heavily one way or the other, it could flip the results once the final score is tallied. (It’s not likely, but it’s certainly possible.)
One thing that hasn’t been clear from the various articles I’ve read is which ballots are left, and when are they counted. Fortunately, the CA Secretary of State has a page that explains exactly that.
This is all handled at the county level, which is why the state office doesn’t have solid numbers yet (there’s a PDF report they’ll be updating as data comes in, but all the numbers are still blank [Edit: as of Thursday evening, numbers for about 2/3 of counties are in, and they total about 2.3 million]), and they have 28 days to finish the task. I’m sure that’s a holdover from the days when it would really take that long to count everything. I imagine it won’t take nearly that long to sign off on the results.
So the lesson is this: If you want your vote counted in the first wave of votes that everyone sees, you must either:
*I never did find out what caused it, but my best guess is that after I moved, my registration got lost in the mail and I was left on the rolls at my old precinct.
I figured I’d wait until after the election to post this one.
Insert your own joke about renting politicians.
(Sorry about the image quality; it was across an intersection, so it was pretty small on the original image. I didn’t even resize it. It’s just cropped. Yeah, my camera isn’t that fantastic once you get down to a 1:1 pixel view)
First, I’m very happy that Barack Obama won the Presidential election. This was the first time since 1996 that I’ve actually liked a candidate for the office. While I did vote for Al Gore and John Kerry, their main qualifications in my mind were that they weren’t George W. Bush, whose policies and leadership style bothered me as soon as he stepped into the ring in the 2000 primaries. It was very nice to have someone I could vote for this year, and not just someone to vote against — and even nicer to see him win.
Second, John McCain gave an astonishingly gracious concession speech. Where was this guy during the campaign? Or during the last two years? This was more like the McCain I voted for in the 2000 primary.
Believe it or not, I think it’s a good thing that the Democrats didn’t pick up that filibuster-proof 60th Senate seat. One of the worst problems with the current administration is the way that a single party just rammed their policies through over all opposition during the time that both houses of Congress and the Presidency were controlled by the same party — and it cost them in the 2006 mid-term elections and in this election. With luck, Obama’s victory speech [edit: linked to the wrong article*.] will set the tone for a somewhat more cooperative government. At the very least, it was a nice change from the sort of “We won, now f— off” attitude that I remember from Bush, Cheney, and Republican supporters in 2004. (Personally I think 53% to 46% in the popular vote is still relatively close, but 4 years ago we were told that 51% to 49% was a “mandate” to do whatever the hell they wanted with the office.)
I’m disappointed to see that California voted to ban same-sex marriage. Gee, too bad about the 18,000 marriages you just invalidated in the name of “protecting” marriage. On the plus side, the margin for Proposition 8 was a lot smaller (52% to 48%) than the last time the state voted on the issue (Proposition 22 in 2001, which won 61% to 38%), and younger voters polled as overwhelmingly rejecting it. This implies that CA society is, over time, coming to the conclusion that maybe it isn’t such a threat after all.
Also worth noting: Prop 4, the parental-notification requirement for abortion, is trailing 52% to 48%, the same spread as Prop 8. Since I’m sure proponents will try again in a few years, these numbers should forestall any grousing about how the people have already made their will clear when someone floats the idea of amending the state constitution to remove a discriminatory clause a few years from now.
*When I first posted this, I accidentally linked to the article on the transition team instead of the speech transcript. The URLs were very similar: 11/04/obama.transcript vs. 11/05/obama.transition.
