“The absentee ballots had to be postmarked no later than August 24, 2010.
I think that’s the problem with some of them.
Mass mailing once Murkowski saw she was losing..... on election night.”
Onyx, I doubt that. The ballots have to be ordered by the individual voter. There is no way to do a mass mailing on election night when Murk saw she was behind. She would have had to collect the unused ballots and forge the names of the voters on them and get them mailed, all by midnight. Not really possible.
If I have a concern, it is not so much the absentee votes as the questioned ballots. There are 9000 of them but no one knows how many of these are dem or GOP. If 6500 are GOP and half belong to Murkowski, she would have to get 1668 more counted than Miller. Not really possible. It is likely the questioned ballots will split evenly. I could even see them favoring Miller.
Keep this in mind. Van Flein and the Lt. Governor are watching this, and they are very good. The GOP lawyers are incompetents and the “top lawyer” Cairncross left Alaska yesterday.
If the Alaska GOP had had an early voting operation and an absentee ballot operation like Begich in 2008, things might be different. But they did not.
Elections can be stolen. I don’t deny that for one minute. In order to steal them, though, you must have at least two things:
First, the election must be razor close. (2% is not razor close). I know of no election day lead of 2% that has ever been overcome by post-election day statewide counts. Stevens’ lead over Begich was about 1%.
Second, the plan to steal the election must be hatched, and extensive preparations made, BEFORE election day. Neither situation obtains here. Begich certainly did this and that is how he won.
A case in point as well is the Louisiana election of 1996. Conservative stalwart Woody Jenkins was ahead of Mary Landrieu by 51-49 on election night about 10 p.m., with the heavily Democrat ninth Ward Precincts in New Orleans yet to report. Jenkins was ahead by over 35,000 votes, but the New Orleans precincts held back. No one believed there were enough votes in the Ninth Ward to swing erase such a lead. Well, the Ninth Ward came in with a margin of over 40,000 for Landrieu and she won by 5500 votes out of 1.7 million cast. Later, Jenkins proved that there were at least 7700 “phantom votes”, which were votes over the number of registered votes at a precinct. He challenged the results, but could not overcome them and the margin was .3 of one percent, not two percent. (frankly, Jenkins made a serous mistake in failing to have poll watchers in teh Ninth Ward on election day. his campaign in New Orleans was run by a novice, not unlike Bitney).
My point is that Landrieu, Begich, and Franken knew they would be in close races. They “prepared” for those races, by methods fair and (perhaps)foul. And they prevailed.
Lisa read the WAPO and the Anchorage Daily Worker, as well as the Dittman and Berkowitz polls, and believed she was going to rout Miller. She made no preparations in advance, as evidenced by her inept campaign manager, John Bitney. Now she is scrambling to overcome a pretty solid lead by Miller. I don’t see it. Not under the circumstances that I know.
I don’t think Sarah Palin sees it either and that was the reason for her confident prediction yesterday.
I put the question to each of you Palinistas: How often is this woman wrong?
I think you are probably right. I’ll be glad when it is resolved.I posted a link above, PPP has been doing a poll. Miller leads against the dem and also wins a 3 way with an indy Lisa.
They tried to marginalize Rubio like they are doing Miller. My left lib/dem sister told me the other day she is voting for Rubio. Too much change to quick,nobody trusts Bambi. Latest poll Rubio up by 10%, and it is only going to grow.
Good explanation.
Thanks for the optimism and the clear thinking.
“First, the election must be razor close. (2% is not razor close). I know of no election day lead of 2% that has ever been overcome by post-election day statewide counts. Stevens’ lead over Begich was about 1%.”
And it was a general election that had over 30,000 absentees to count - not even near that number here in this primary.