Wasn't Ohio going to begin to count provisional ballots last weekend?

[WI_DEM]

I mean this last Saturday. Any word on if Kerry has closed the gap any? or have they released any results?

[MrUnderhill]

1. Yes.

Several counties have reported at least the percentage of their provisional ballots that (pre-challenge I suppose) are acceptable.

It's a much higher percentage than Republicans had indicated would be valid - Ohio supposedly has looser rules for what to accept. Some states only ahve around 10% of their provisional ballots determined to be valid - it looks like Ohio is going to come in around 75%.

[WI_DEM]

2. good

and these usually favor democrats. I'm hoping it can get close enough so an automatic state recount will be initiated.

[MrUnderhill]

4. I'm not sure.

I think provisional ballots would likely fall in line with other voted in the county in question. Cuyahuga, for instance, has around 25,000 of those 135,000 ballots. THOSE would break heavily for Kerry. But I don't know that a Republican county wouldn't have provisional ballots that favor the Republican.

I guess the question "what caused them to be provisional?" and does the answer imply a Democratic demographic?


Ohio doesn't have "automatic" recounts, but allows the "loser" to request one if the margin gets under 1/2%. That would require the 137,000 vote margin to be reduced to under 27,500.

That would require the provisional ballots to be 80%+ valid and go 100% for Kerry. Pretty unlikely.

[OnceAndFutureTruth]

8. But won't a recount favor the Democratic candidate?

I thought I had read (and I'm sorry but I don't have a link) that the majority of OH precincts used punch card ballots. AND they have strict rules, already in place, about what constitutes a legal vote.

So, when the entire state is recounted, as I understand that it will be, courtesy of the the request soon to be made by the Libertarians and the Greens, it won't just be the provisionals that are going to be the issue. Am I correct in this assumption?

I thought I had heard that there were 97,000 ballots simply "thrown out" in OH. My understanding was that those were in addition to the provisionals. Won't a recount take a second look at those too? Please forgive if I have that 97,000 number wrong. I am getting overloaded with info on this issue.

In other words, my question is, what will be counted in OH? Here is how I understand it: ballots already counted + any ballots that the scanners didn't count the first time around + provisionals + absentees + any "thrown out" ballots that can be shown to be good + (anything else I missed?)

Did I get the above wrong? Or is this how it is really going to go? Does anybody have a better take on the numbers on this?

[MrUnderhill]

9. It certainly can't hurt!

Since we already lost, a recount can only help us.

Yes, Ohio has clear rules for chads (two adjacent corners must be cleanly separated for a vote to count). And yes, I think the number of under/over votes is around 90,000.
But, as we learned in Florida, the VAST majority of those 90,000 cards aren't going to meet that criteria. Remember how incredibly close THAT count was? A small percentage of "spoiled" ballots equaled a big proportion of the vote difference.

I'd imagine that a hand recount could discern fewer than 10,000 votes from that pool of 90,000. I hate any assumption that rests on Democratic voters being "stupider" than everyone else, but even assuming a 2-1 split for Kerry (highly unlikely), that gains us around 3,000 net votes when Kerry needs to gain almost 140,000.

All uncounted ballots included, I don't see Ohio getting any closer than 100,000 votes. Our best shot is demonstrating clear fraud... not recounting on the margins. This is a much larger gap than in 2000.

[OnceAndFutureTruth]

10. Hey!!! The gap may turn out to be much smaller! Read this!

Its David Schuster on Hardblogger (MSNBC) who writes:
<snip>
If you assume, for the sake of argument, that Kerry receives 80 percent of the 130,000 provisional ballots most observers expect will be validated... Kerry would receive 104,000 votes and President Bush would get 26,000. That's a net gain for John Kerry of 78,000. At that point, the margin between President Bush and Senator Kerry would drop to 58,000 votes.

Now, let's assume a preference can be determined on all 93,000 spoiled ballots. And let's also assume John Kerry receives 80% and President Bush receives 20%. John Kerry would receive 74,400 votes and President Bush would receive 18,600 votes. That's another net gain for John Kerry of 55,800. However, that still leaves John Kerry 3,000 votes short. And remember, the theory that Kerry is going to receive 80% of all provisional and "spoiled" ballots is not realistic. As the Kerry campaign noted on November 3, "the votes are just not going to be there."

SO, it even though Schuster still doesn't see a win for Kerry in the ballots that are provisional or reclaimed from the spoiled category, it still looks pretty darn close!!!
Here is the link to read the entire thing (its not long):
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5445086

[MrUnderhill]

12. Unfortunately... they key words here are "for the sake of argument"

Even Cuyahoga only went to Kerry by 2-1. A 4-1 margin statewide is unlikely. Especially since only 20% of the ballots are IN Cuyahoga and only around 60% are even in counties we won.

Then we get "Now, let's assume a preference can be determined on all 93,000 spoiled ballots. And let's also assume John Kerry receives 80% and President Bush receives 20%."

That's a bit too much "assuming" for me. My best scenario would be 90% of 135,000 ballots are readable and break 2-1 for Kerry (gain of 40,000 votes) and half of the under-votes are readable and also break 2-1 (gain of 16,000 or so). Add a hope that for some reason, the overseas absentee ballots DON'T break against us and we lose no more ground there.... Kerry is still only half way home.

But I will say that even a 5% chance of victory looks pretty good when my guy has already conceded. It's more hope than I had a week ago.

[jfern]

13. Ummm, easy solution

If Kerry is down by 3000 votes, get thos 3800 extra Bush votes in Franklin county subtracted.

[OnceAndFutureTruth]

3. Do you have a link to that info? I t would be very useful.

[MrUnderhill]

6. Sure.

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-provisional-ballots-ohio,0,2681818.story?coll=sns-ap-nationworld-headlines

It's a little old (Last Wednesday), but it's what I could find.


"In 2000, about 107,000 of the 123,518 provisional ballots were deemed valid, or about 87 percent. If that percentage holds for the 2004 election, Kerry wouldn't win even if every single provisional ballot were somehow cast for him. "

"Cuyahoga County, which began processing its 24,788 provisional ballots Wednesday, found 1,749 valid and 917 invalid ballots the first day, said Bob Bennett, chairman of the county elections board and head of the state GOP. "


My favorit paragraph: "Before the election, Democrats waged an unsuccessful legal battle to allow provisional ballots to count if they were cast in the wrong precinct but the right county. But of the 2,666 provisional ballots processed by Wednesday in Cuyahoga County, only one was thrown out because the voter was in the wrong precinct, Bennett said."

Gee.. I remember getting all worked up about that ruling. Much ado about nothing I guess.

[danfromqueens]

5. where is the truth

lets see it

[fliesincircles]

7. SOS site is down

Haven't been able to check Ohio SOS site since early Sun afternoon. "Cannot find server" errors. Either heavy traffic, or Katherine doesn't like what he sees.

[Woo]

11. I heard...

Most likely NOT from a reliable news source -- but this is what I heard -- Kerry was down by 170,000 votes --


The source is Joe Scarborough tonight... Jack Buckman I believe said it (alright, lemme have it)