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Family and Friends is my everyday journal. Captain's Log is where I pontificate on religion and politics.

Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Crazy night

Grinnygranny got home last night and the three of us went out to vote. E left Sunday for Tucson to be with his son, who turned 5 yesterday. Hard to imagine the grandson being that old!
It only took about twenty minutes to vote, but the rest of the voting places were crazy.
In 2006, a high turnout year there were 104,000 votes cast in the entire state, Dem and Repub. This was a caucus and only Dems were voting so it was figured only 30 to 40,000 would vote in the entire state. Rio Rancho is heavily Republican so they only had one voting place -- at the high school.
Numerous voting places ran out of ballots and the line was so long to vote in Rio Rancho it took up to four hours. At the 10pm news they were still voting.
When we woke up this morning Hillary was leading by 120 votes with 153,000+ counted, four counties not tabulated yet and 17,000 provisional ballots which could take three to four weeks to count, as they have to be verified.
We have 38 total delegates to the convention with 10 of them being at large, and the breakdown with the voting this close means the remaining 28 will be split down the middle or the winner getting one or two more than the other, when that's determined.
Ya think people are interested in this election?

Right now it looks like I'll head out for Texas Tues. night, take Mom for Pre-op work up on Wed. surgery on Thrus., and bring her home on Fri. and head home Sat.
Bruce took her yesterday for the MRI and the surgery won't be set until this Friday. We all really hope this settles her back problems down and she won't need any more surgeries.

Ran across this at New Mexico FBIHOP this is the way the state's delegates break down so far.

Three congressional districts get 6 delegates each
6 at-large chosen from statewide vote
3 State leaders (Richardson, Bingaman, and Udall)
12 Super delegates

Right now it looks like districts 1 & 3 are evenly split, and Clinton had the majority in district 2.
That's 3 + 2 + 3 for Obama or 8 district delegates.
3 + 4 + 3 for Clinton or 10 district delegates.
Statewide vote could go either way, but the margin won't be enough to do anything other than split.

Obama would be 8 + 3 = 11
Clinton 10 + 3 = 13

State Leaders and Super delegates are anyone's guess.

It will cost the state millions of dollars to count the provisional ballots to determine if one or two of the At-Large delegates go the other way. Seems like a real waste of money.

Still nearly 200,000 Democratic voters from this state -- that's amazing.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I was turned away from the polls because I'm an Independent. Those idiots behind the table had to say aloud, "You can't vote. You're an Independent". I felt like borrowing the Woody Allen line: "A little louder. I don't think the people in back of the line heard you". This is why I dislike politics.

P M Prescott said...

Just the learning curve on living in a new state. Some states let independents vote in primaries.