Obama tightens margin in Missouri vote count

Barack Obama has tightened the margin in Missouri, between his votes and those for John McCain.

However, McCain still leads in the state. The latest news on the ballot count, from "The Kansas City Star":

The Kansas City Election Board certified its final results Monday.

Barack Obama picked up 491 votes from provisionals and other adjustments in the city; John McCain picked up 123 votes (from unofficial returns released election night.) That's a net gain for Obama of 368 votes in Kansas City.
Overall, the Missouri Secretary of State says Obama trails McCain by 4,716 votes as of 2:30 p.m. Monday.

(UPDATE: The margin moved back to 4,780 at 3:15.)
Final certifications are due with the SoS Tuesday, although the state has until early December to certify its final totals.
Incidentally, Kansas City reported 23,344 absentee ballots this year -- more than double the absentees in 2004.

WHY THE MEDIA HAVEN'T CALLED MISSOURI
From fivethirtyeight.com:

Why The Networks Haven't Called Missouri

From turnout guru Michael McDonald, who is in a position to know:
As someone who works in the quarantine room on election night at Edison Media Research, I can tell you that we will not make a call if a race has the potential to be in a recount situation. In a close race, we review the recount procedures and consider what we believe to be the outstanding absentee and provisional ballots before we are willing to make a call. It is not the job of the media to prejudge the election process when there is a possibility for recount procedures to take place. Think: Florida 2000.
If the Obama campaign makes a formal statement that they concede Missouri, then I would expect the media would call the election outcome. My guess is that they will wait until the results are certified to make a decision if they will request a recount. As we have seen in Minnesota, there can be human errors lurking in the results reported to date.
The big picture: the Obama campaign has every right to a recount if they want one, and the networks aren't presuming to make that judgment for them. There is also a small but tangible chance of a material human error in the vote tabulation.

Stevens still losing to Begich (Alaska Senate seat)

2008, the election that keeps on giving . . . .

"The Anchorage Daily News" reports (as of Sat., 11/15/08, 4 AM EST) that Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich' lead over incumbent Senator Ted Stevens grown to 1,022 votes. Click here for details on Democrat Begich's continuing lead position over veteran Republican Stevens, in the battle for the senior Alaska sentator's seat.
By this point, over 90 percent of the ballots have been counted.

Notes on remaining counts/recounts: Maryland, and so on

As I noted earlier, Barack Obama won Nebraska's Second District. In 2004 George W. Bush beat John Kerry with 61 percent of the vote in the district, as CQ Politics reported, this morning, November 11, 2008.

Congressional races:
Maryland: Democrat Frank Kratovil has ratcheted up 2,154 votes over Republican Andy Harris. This seat was a long-GOP-held seat.

Congressional races with margins less than 1,000:
Ohio: Republican Steve Stivers is leading Mary Jo Kilroy.
Virginia: In a western VA district, "Democrat Tom Perriello, an organizer of faith-based groups, has declared victory over six-term Republican Rep. Virgil H. Goode Jr," according to CQ Reports.

Senate races:
Democrats are leading with 55 seats, plus two allied independents. (Obama is advocating retaining Lieberman in the Democratic caucus.)Georgia's Senate race is heading to a run-off. It is one of the few states that mandates that candidates gain a majority in order to win offices. The Republican incumbent Saxby Chambliss clearly defeated the Democratic challenger, Jim Martin. Libertarian Allen Buckley's votes will likely go to Chambliss in the run-off.
In Oregon conservative Constitution Party candidate Dave Brownlow played the spoiler role. Jeff Merkley, Democrat has defeated incumbent Gordon Smith, 48 percent to 45 percent.

Races heading for recounts:
Alaska: Democrat Begich challenged Republican Ted Stevens. Stevens leads by 3,257 votes according to The Juneau Empire this morning, so this race is not settled.

Minnesota, Senate: Democrat Al Franken is challenging first term Republican Norm Coleman. CQ reported that Coleman's "advantage at the moment is one one-hundredth of one percentage point." The election will head to a recount.

Obama leading in Omaha; victory lauded by state's Democratic Senator

Barack Obama is leading by over 1,200 votes in unofficial figures for Nebraska's Second Congressional District, which contains Omaha.
The Lincoln Journal Star cites Obama has having more than 134,000 votes in the district; this would mean that he would have a lead of 1,260 over John McCain.

Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson lauded Obama for his victory in the eastern Nebraska district.

"Today, Nebraska's 2nd District voters added an 'Obamaha' shaped exclamation point to Barack Obama's historic election. It really is a new day in America when he even picks up an electoral vote in Nebraska.

Nebraska and Maine have unique laws allowing electoral votes to be apportioned to different candidates; votes are split by Congressional District. This occasion is the first since 1964 that a Democrat earned an electoral vote in the state.

The state's other senator, Chuck Hagel traveled with Obama to Europe this summer; Hagel's wife, Lilibet, endorsed Obama last month.

This brings Obama's electoral count to 365, to McCain's 162. Complete results will not be known until next week. Obama won North Carolina; Missouri results remain undetermined.

Video your Vote to Monitor Equipment Failures, Long Lines ...

Video Your Vote, a joint YouTube, PBS effort, will use maps to monitor equipment failures, long lines, more.

* * *

At Youtube: a legal primer on how to video your vote.

Alternet: Some PA counties may ignore paper ballot court order

SOme Pennsylvania counties may ignore court order for paper ballots, alternet.org reports.

MI Voting Machines Fail Pre-Election Tests

From Wired, via Huffington Post:

Optical-scan machines made by Election Systems & Software failed recent pre-election tests in a Michigan county, producing different tallies for the same ballots every time, the top election official in Oakland County revealed in a letter made public Monday.

The problems occurred during logic and accuracy tests in the run-up to this year's general election, Oakland County Clerk Ruth Johnson disclosed in a letter submitted October 24 (.pdf) to the federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC). The machines at issue are ES&S M-100 optical-scan machines, which read and tally election results from paper ballots.

Johnson worried that such problems -- linked tentatively to paper dust build-up in the machines -- could affect the integrity of the general election this week.

"The same ballots, run through the same machines, yielded different results each time," she wrote. "This begs the question -- on Election Day, will the record number of ballots going through the remaining tabulators leave even more build-up on the sensors, affecting machines that tested just fine initially? Could this additional build-up on voting tabulators that have not had any preventative maintenance skew vote totals? My understanding is that the problem could occur and election workers would have no inkling that ballots are being misread."

Tuesday's election is expected to be the busiest ever, and ES&S tabulators -- both touchscreen machines and optical-scan machines -- were responsible for counting 50 percent of the votes in the last four major U.S. elections, according to the company. The company's optical-scan machines are now deployed in 43 states.

Johnson, who could not be reached for comment, said that "four of our communities or eight percent" had reported inconsistent vote totals during the logic and accuracy tests with the ES&S machines. She also said that conflicting vote totals had surfaced in other areas of Michigan as well, though she didn't elaborate on this in her letter. "While problems with performance and design with the M-100s have been documented, this is the first time I have ever questioned the integrity of these machines," Johnson wrote in her letter.

According to news stories, a race in the August Republican primary in one Michigan township did have a discrepancy in tallies that were counted by hand and by ES&S optical-scan machines. The clerks race in Plymouth Township was recounted after the losing candidate requested it. The initial machine count had showed Joe Bridgman defeating Mary Ann Prchlik by 1,920 to 1,770. But the hand count narrowed the margin to 1,885 to 1,727. Officials attributed the discrepancy to "smears and marks" on the ballots, which skewed the results when they were run through the machines.

(and the article continues . . . .)

BREAKING NEWS: Massive vote machine failures in NV

The following is an exclusive from Brad Friedman's Brad Blog:

EXCLUSIVE: Obama/DNC Incident Report Database Reveals Startling, Wide-Spread Voting Machine Problems Across Nevada During Early Voting
Presidential Race Missing on Ballots; Machines Go Down; Votes Not Recorded; Printers Jam
Attorneys Decline to Take Action to Remove Machines From Service, Ensure Paper Ballots for Voters...

Wide-spread voting machine failures have been reported to the Obama/DNC election protection hotline in Nevada since early voting began more than a week ago in the state, The BRAD BLOG has learned. All voters who vote in person in the crucial battleground state are forced to cast their votes on 100% unverifiable Sequoia EDGE touch-screen voting machines with the VeriVote "paper trail" printer add-on.

Attorneys monitoring the incident reports coming in to the hotline have taken no action in regard to removing the failed machines from service, despite reports of the presidential race not appearing at all on some ballots; voters having problems selecting their preferred candidates; machines not starting up at all; "paper trail" printers jamming or running out of paper, and; a number of machines at a number of sites which refuse to work at all.

And this is just during early voting. A number of those startling reports are posted at the end of this article...

Democratic Officials Refuse to Impound Machines, Despite Myriad Failures...

We've been reporting for weeks about the lack of action being taken by the Obama campaign and the DNC in regard to wide-spread voting machine problems across the country (e.g., detailed story on that here, Obama attorney responds here).

We've noted that while Obama/DNC has, this time around at least, compiled a sophisticated "election protection" database in each state, their continuous assertions of "thousands of attorneys on the ground on Election Day if anything goes wrong," is both too little and too late, as well as being precisely what we heard from Kerry/DNC in 2004 before they failed to take appropriate action with failed machines. They then quickly conceded the race just hours after polls in Ohio finally closed.

The Obama/DNC response to wide-spread problems with voting machines failing in state after state has been no better than Kerry/DNC's, in that failed machines have been allowed to stay in service, and their attorneys have not fought for paper ballots for voters instead.

In fact, in Pennsylvania, state Democrats have been fighting against paper ballots. Even after the NAACP successfully sued the state Dems (who were joined for a time during the case by state Republicans) to require them to have some emergency paper ballots on hand, it's become clear that county officials in that crucial battleground state are likely to not have enough paper ballots at polling places for voters in the completely-predictable event of voting machine breakdown. PA also uses 100% unverifiable touch-screen systems across most of the state.

We've urged the Democrats to take action to remove problem machines from service, such as those flipping votes on screens in so many states and even failing to register Oprah's vote. We advised them to impound such machines rather than dangerously calling for them to be "recalibrated" in the middle of the election. They have not done so. Anywhere.

The following reports from the Obama/DNC "Atlas Voter Protection" database in NV, concerning the state's faulty, error-prone, hackable, 100% unverifiable Sequoia touch-screen systems are remarkable. These are the same machines that Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) recently said voters in his state were "fortunate" to have, during a radio interview in Reno. (3 minute MP3 here.)

The senator was convinced that the "Voter-Verifiable Paper Audit Trail" printed by the machine somehow offered protection for voters, even though the paper trails on such systems often fail and are not properly verified for accuracy by a majority of voters. Moreover, the "paper trails" on these machines can be hacked as well, in such a way that the tampered totals would match the internally tampered numbers, even if officials bothered to count them, which they don't. (See UCSB's video demonstrating how to hack such machines in seconds, in such a way that even a 100% hand-count would be unlikely to reveal the tampering.) . . . .

The BradBlog report continues here.

Dixville, NH, for Obama, first Dem in a generation

The unique hamlet in New Hampshire, Dixville Notch, had its midnight vote last night. The majority vote for Barack Obama, 15 to 6. This was the first time that the town voted Democratic since 1968. Neighboring Hart's Location chose Obama over John McCain by 17 to 10.