Missouri’s presidential results got 699 votes tighter

[Khaotic]

St. Louis Post Dispatch

Missouri’s presidential results got 699 votes tighter — without those as-yet-uncounted provisional ballots — after St. Louis County completed a new final tally of its votes in Tuesday’s election.

Political Fix got a copy of those tallies, including the township-by-township breakdown, this morning.

The county is the state’s largest voting bloc, and had thousands of voting machines and optical scanners in use. After retallying all the machines, and rechecking the scanners, the county’s final results changed.

The county also included some military ballots that apparently didn’t get counted Tuesday night.

The new county totals have yet to be reported to the secretary of state’s office.

The upshot in the presidential contest’s new official final numbers from St. Louis County:

Democrat Barack Obama-Joe Biden – 332,085 (up 1,928 from election night number now on state elections Web site)

Republican John McCain-Sarah Palin – 221,016 (up 1,229 from election night number)

The third-party candidates all gained a few as well.

The new county results reduces McCain’s statewide edge to 5,160 votes (from the 5,859 now on state Web site.)

Elections officials all over the state are just now going through roughly 7,000 provisional ballots that are not included in the statewide tally, until it can be verified which of those ballots were cast by properly registered voters at the right polling place.

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I don't know if this info was already posted here or not.

Chances still don't look that great though in MO.

Also to consider, in the past two elections, fewer than half of the provisional ballots cast ended up counting as legitimate in Missouri.

In 2006, only 3,282 of 7,401 provisional ballots counted.

In 2004, 3,292 out of 8,183 counted.

But ... you never know. Chances are that almost ALL of the provisional ballots have votes for Obama.

This could still swing Missouri back to Blue.

The "official" results are being tracked at: http://www.sos.mo.gov/enrweb/statewideresults.asp?eid=256

[yeswecanandwedid]

1. Thanks for sharing, I had been wondering what was up with Mo-zourri. nt

[ej510]

2. How many un-counted votes are there?

[Khaotic]

3. Provisional Ballots

There are more than 7,000 of them.

[surrealAmerican]

4. Can people who voted on provisional ballots ...

... find out if their votes got counted?

[Khaotic]

5. Hmmmm

I'm not sure.

Maybe the Missouri Secretary of State web site would have POC info that you could use to find out.

I don't know off hand myself.

I know there's ways to find out if you're registered, but since we vote anonymously here in America (i.e. we don't put our names on our ballots and such) then I don't think there's a way to know if they were counted or not.

I think the only way there's any tracking at all is through absantee ballots. I know that the envelope my absantee ballot came in had a bar code on it. When I used it to vote at an early voting location here in Iowa, they put it in the envelope that had the bar code on it. They said that the absantee ballots are tracked so they know the ballot was indeed used and didn't just sit at my home.

They also want to be able to have a way of keeping absantee voters from trying to vote twice. A person could attempt to vote using an absantee ballot at an early voting location, then turn around and vote on election night. Bad, bad person if anyone out there tried to do that.

I know that when you vote you also 'sign in' and it's notated on the roster at your polling place (at least here in Scott Co. Iowa).

If a person votes twice you could be fined a pretty good sum of money.

I digress.

In a nutshell, I doubt there's a snowball chance in hell of a person finding out if there vote was counted, regardless of what state you live in. The closest thing to feeling like your vote was counted is when your ballot goes into a scan machine and you see the vote tally go up by one and the little machine beeps to let you know your ballot was accepted. If your ballot doesn't scan correctly it's kicked back out and a poll worker looks it over to see what's wrong. Absantee ballots, early votes, etc. don't get that treatment, I think they just get shit canned. Sad.