Election Updates

Well, Franken is still down, but Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com says that his math has Franken to winning the recount by 27 votes.

He notes that his number have error bars much larger than 27 votes though, but Nate did call a Begich win the day after the election.

That being said, he is also not considering either the thousands of challenged ballots or rejected absentee votes, and those numbers dwarf his error bar too.

Meanwhile, in the Georgia Senate runoff, the 'Phants fracked up big time. They sent out a mailing to Republithug voters to get thm to vote by absentee ballots, and neglected to mention that they should sign the applications:

Many of the unsigned requests came in the form of cards printed by the Republican National Committee and mailed to voters. Republican U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss is in a tight battle to retain his seat by beating Democratic challenger Jim Martin.

The signature line on the RNC cards is easy to miss since it appears after an entry asking voters to enter an address different from their permanent one. Georgia doesn’t require voters to give a reason for voting by absentee ballot.

OOPS.

We also have Tom Perriello certified as defeating racist scumbag Rep. Virgil H. Goode by 745 votes. Goode is likely to ask for a recount, but the margin is actually large enough that it's unlikely to matter.

One interesting thing about all this is that because the certification was so late, Perriello couldn't take part in the office lottery for freshmen.

Not to worry though, he gets what's left and that's Virgil Goode's office, which, because Goode was a 6 term incumbent, is a very nice office. Heh.

Finally, though not technically an election, but Biden aide Ted Kaufman has been selected to replace the him when he becomes Vice-President.