Sunday, November 09, 2008

The Senate is still in play

Well, well. MSNBC thinks that there is still a possibility that the Democrats can make it to 60 votes in the Senate. So does Josh Marshall at TPM. Here's how.

The Democrats now have 57 Senators if we include the turncoat Joe Lieberman. There are three Senate raced that have yet to be determined. Those are Alaska's Republican convicted felon Ted Stevens vs. Democrat Mark Begich, Minnesota's Republican (accused in court of being paid off under the table) Norm Coleman vs. Democrat Al Franken, and the race between incumbent Republican Saxby Chambliss and the Democratic candidate former state Rep. Jim Martin.

Alaska

In Alaska Stevens currently leads Begich by 3,400 votes but there are 55,000 absentee and provisional votes not yet counted. That count is expected to take about a week. Alaska's vote turnout is also surprisingly low while the results are very different from what the polls predicted, leading to questions of possible severe vote irregularities. This election's not over. Alaska's only Congressman, Don Young, who is under investigation by the FBI for corruption, was also surprisingly reelected. The results of the Alaska election are not in yet. Nate Silver provides an argument for why the recounts might break for Begich.

Minnesota

The most interesting race remains the one in Minnesota between Coleman and Franken. At last count Coleman led by a scant 326 votes. Because it is so close there will be a recount. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune notes that there are at least 25,000 ballots in which voters voted for President but not Senate. These are called "undervotes."[*] These undervotes could be a result of "over votes"[**] in which the optical scanners thought that the voter marked more than one candidate for Senator. In that case the optical scanning machine reading the ballot will simply not count any vote in that race. But the recount will be manual, and the counters will be looking for a clear indication of who the voter intended to vote for. What is especially bad for Norm Coleman is that most of the ballots with votes for President and no Senate are in counties which are primarily Democratic. It is highly likely that Al Franken will come out of a recount as the winner.

Coleman knows the danger and has already gone to court to stop the recount. The court has thrown out his law suit.

Georgia

The incumbent Republican Saxby Chambliss has won his reelection race, but because of the votes taken by Libertarian Allen Buckley Chamblis did not win the required 50% of the vote that would prevent a run-off election. The Atalanta Journal-Constitution has the details. The run-off will be Dec. 2. The common wisdom is that the run-off will not bring out the number of voters who voted in the Presidential election, and that Martin came as close to beating Chambliss because of African-American voters who voted a straight Democratic ticket to elect Barack Obama. The result is that the Chambliss voters will return in larger percentages to vote for Chambliss than the Democratic voters. The Democrats, in this view, were voting for Obama, not Martin.

However, if the run-off is seen as the race that makes the difference for the Democrats to get a filibuster-proof majority of 60 votes in the Senate, then the national Democratic party may pull out all the stops, to include having Barack Obama campaign for Jim martin. That would also cause the national Republicans, still licking their wounds from November 4, to drop into the run-off with both feet, if only for pride.

How likely that is will depend on the outcomes in Alaska and Minnesota. It is also going to be weighing heavily on Harry Reid's mind as he and the Democratic Senate Caucus determine what to do about Joe Lieberman.

In short, the November 4th election isn't over yet nationally. The fun continues.


[*]An "undervote" is a case where the ballot has a vote for President but no vote for Senator. Since both appear at the top of the ballot it is considered unlikely that a high percentage of voters in one location will vote for President but skip Senator, so it is a strong indicator that there was an error recording the vote. Vote fraud is possible.

[**] An "overvote" is a term used with an optically scanned ballot when the scanner thinks it reads marks alongside more than one candidate in a particular race. When that happens the scanner does not record any vote in that race. Frequently it means the voter intended to vote for one candidate but accidentally placed a mark of some kind in a second block. The voter's intent is normally very clear visually in case of a recount.

No comments: