What's Left To Count

SDSU and UCSD students vote provisional en masse (8.00 / 2)

http://www.nctimes.com/article...

Two college precincts at UC San Diego and San Diego State University, she said, came "dangerously close" to running out of Democratic ballots before elections workers trucked more out to them.

...

Seiler said the ballot-shortage problem arose when too many voters wanted to cast provisional ballots, which were special ballots given to voters who show up at the wrong precinct.

Seiler said many of the voters were urged by political campaigns to "just go and vote" even if they did not go to their assigned polling places.

"In some cases we had reports of 100 percent of the people in line were voting provisionally," she said. "But we did the best we could, and to the best of my knowledge we didn't turn anybody away."

I take umbrage with Seiler's disdain at volunteers telling people to go vote. First of all, and I can't speak for every volunteer, but the message our UCSD student GOTV efforts were getting out is that students should make all possible effort to vote in their actual precinct. We went to extreme lengths to help students find out where they were registered and where their polling place was. But, if all else fails, yes of course we're going to tell people that they should vote, even if that means doing a provisional ballot. /umbrage

Anyway point of quoting the above passage is that the student vote--heavily Obama--is going to be among the not-yet-counted. Students live in both CA-50 and CA-53, since the border is right along UCSD.  

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by: CarlsbadDem @ Wed Feb 06, 2008 at 22:10:46 PM CST

provisional ballots (0.00 / 0)

Speaking from my personal experience as a pollworker, assuming voters did not lie to us and things were similar around the state, most of those provisional votes came from non-partisan vote-by-mail voters who got their non-partisan ballots in the mail but did not realize they needed to send in a form or surrender their N-P ballot if they wanted to vote in the democratic primary. They showed up at the polls with no ballot to surrender so we had to vote them provisionally. Assuming they never turned in their N-P ballot, their provisional ballot should definitely count. I'm less clear what happens to the ones who DID send in their N-P ballot but then took a dem ballot at the polls and only voted in the presidential race. But we only had a couple of those.

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by: plymouth @ Wed Feb 06, 2008 at 22:49:12 PM CST

OT, but -- change the banner already! (0.00 / 0)

February 5 is right around the corner. Check out the Calitics endorsements!

It's still around the corner, but we've passed it.

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by: Major Danby @ Thu Feb 07, 2008 at 13:27:03 PM CST

Absentees postmarked on time (0.00 / 0)

that didn't arrive in time don't count, by the way, do they?  At least that was so according to the instructions that I read on my PAV ballot.

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by: Major Danby @ Thu Feb 07, 2008 at 13:32:17 PM CST

yeah that's what I thought (0.00 / 0)

they have to ARRIVE by the date, not postmark. Maybe they just say that to be safe, or??

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by: CarlsbadDem @ Thu Feb 07, 2008 at 14:43:15 PM CST

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