The word is that Begich is now up by 871 votes. About 40,000 more ballots will be counted today and Monday. Here is Celtic Diva's take on the counting process. I'm not as convinced as she is that there wasn't a little weirdness going on at first, but I'm sure we'll hear more after this is all over.
http://divasblueoasis.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=310http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0Sk36Jm3mY&eurl=http://divasblueoasis.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=310I love Rachel Maddow...I really do. However, in the case of the Alaska election she was definitely getting her information from folks who were not directly hands-on with the process. The Begich Campaign has had boots-on-the-ground since long before Election Day. They have had people all over the state the entire time. No one was more frustrated by the early conspiracy-theory panic than they were...because the folks who were spreading it weren't talking to them. It also seemed like there were folks out there with a lack-of-understanding of Alaska's unique challenges, transportation and otherwise, who turned this into something it was not. At the very least, they sounded the alarm bell rather prematurely.
There never were hidden ballots, no "lost ballots" or "found ballots." There never was a "mystery" as to where the ballots were. It was taking a long time because:
a) 1/3 of ALL ballots are either early vote, absentee or questioned...that is an unheard of number in Alaska until this year. That fact is NOT A DANGER SIGNAL EITHER! The Begich Campaign was in every village, every city pushing early and absentee voting right along with the Obama Campaign! Guess what? It worked!
b) This year, there is a new procedure where EVERY BALLOT had to be double checked to make sure no one accidentally voted twice...absentee and on Election Day. Why was that procedure established? Because 26 people during the primary voted twice and they wanted to close that loophole. Who is the one that motivated this new procedure? The Democratic Party!
c) Due to the Bush Administration's war on unions and desperate desire to privatize mail delivery under one of his corporate buddies, the amazingly efficient US Postal Service has had their budget repeatedly whacked as of late. As a result...and because of the outrageous cost of aircraft fuel in Alaska...they have had to cut back on mail deliveries to Rural Alaska. Since that's how most of their ballots travel, we've had to wait.
There were some people especially worried about the Diebold machines and the GEMS tabulator...with legitimate concerns from past Alaska elections and problems in the lower-48. However, I was absolutely stunned that (to my knowledge) NONE of these people who were worried showed up at the absentee ballot counting at Division of Elections so they could actually look at the the tapes first-hand from each district count as they were coming out of the machines. The procedure was as wide-open as they could allow without danger of exposing privacy information. Media was allowed to film everything except (understandably) the individual ballots close-up. The openness of the Department of Elections was very different from two years ago under pageant queen Whitney Brewster and then Lt. Governor Loren "The Undertaker" Leman.
The ironic and entertaining part was that Republicans were the ones baffled by the results. As we'd look at each tape, we'd see McCain/Palin win easily in the Republican-leaning districts, yet in the majority of them, Stevens would lose to Begich. Why they were suprised that folks would vote cross-party to avoid electing a felon is amazing. What it did for me was renew my faith in Alaskans.
Mayor (and hopefully soon-to-be Senator) Begich's appearance on Rachel Maddow was well timed, as we still have another nail-biting 5 days to go. While not discouraging vigilence, his reassurances have gone a long way to dispell some of the fears of shell-shocked politicos, a Palin/Stevens-weary public and my favorite Rhodes scholar television journalist.
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