Besides, if Kerry knew he had the votes to force a recount or win in Ohio, I don't think we would have conceded the election at all...
People,
We don't have any firm numbers for this thread. The only thing official we know is the SOS website listed 155,000 provisionals statewide.
The "spoiled ballots" are ballots temporarily shelved because they did not show a vote for prez (undervotes) or they showed two votes for prez (overvotes).
A process has been underway the last few days to identify which of the 155000 PVs are valid votes by validly registered voters. We have only rumor as to how that evaluation is going In Total. We do have a partial count earlier this week that suggested about 66% of them would be ruled valid votes. That 66% were scattered all over the state, though there are rumors about that though scattered they are concentrated in urban areas of various cities. That would imply a leaning towards Kerry for them.
It is not clear if the 88000 number earlier in this thread is the actual count of the 155,000 PVs that are ruled valid or some additional number of potential votes.
Bush's lead is about 132000 after deducting the known error reported earlier of 3800 votes.
In the worst case of interpretation of all the rumors, there are 155000 + 88000 votes available to make up that gap. That's 243000 votes. The way to perform the calculation for what is needed is to deduct 132K from 243K and get 112K. Kerry needs 132K + 1/2 of that remaining 112K to catch up. This is 66K + 132K = 198000 votes. This is 81% of the total worst case interpretation of what total is available to extract votes from.
Bush's odds of victory remain good.
I am kind of confused. There seems to be a lot of contradictory information here.
Were ballots discarded, were they not? Overvote yes, undervotes not?
Provisional ballots?