The Washington State Republican Party did something very, very odd yesterday. They sent out a press release announcing that McCain had won the state 25.5% to Huckabee’s 23.7%. What’s odd about the press release is that it also announces that only 87.2% of the precincts have been counted!
Considering that McCain and Huckabee are only 1.8 points apart, and Huckabee actually led McCain at one point during the count, isn’t it kind of strange to pick a winner while there are still enough outstanding uncounted votes to change the outcome? This isn’t a news outlet predicting the result – this is a press release from the actual body holding the election.
Huckabee is raising a stink, as he probably should. What is going on in the Washington Republican Party? Is the leadership so pro-McCain they tried to prevent Huckabee from embarassing the front-runner by winning three primaries after the contest is supposedly over?
As I mentioned over in GD, they may be having trouble collecting the numbers from some of Washington’s remote mountain villages.
We’ll see come monday, at which time they tell us they’ll have a ‘final’ report.
I’m sure that the Washington GOP’s commitment to democracy is every bit as strong as the national party’s, so everything is bound to work out for the best.
That’s perfectly understandable. If it takes more time, it takes more time. The weird thing is announcing McCain as the winner when the contest is still undecided.
Anybody who’s worked in elections, or polling, or sampling, or even sending surveys to members of your church choir, knows that it is quite possible to accurately project the final result based on a small early return.
In voting, as long as you know where the unreturned precincts are, and their past history, you can pretty accurately predict the results.
Nationwide polls are done using about 1,000 people to predict for a 300 million population, and are generally fairly accurate. At work, we often base decisions on surveys when only a third of our employees return them. And organizations I belong too commonly have annual elections with less than half the members returning ballots.
Much as I hate to defend republicans, I don’t see declaring a result based on 7/8ths of the total as being unreasonable.
Interesting. I dropped my mail-in ballot in the box at the courthouse on the 5th, but unless I seriously misread something, the ballot deadline is the 19th. Since we switched to vote-by-mail here (I’m not sure if this is statewide, or just my county), ballots have arrived in my mailbox 2-4 weeks before Election Day. This primary ballot only showed up a few days before the 5th, which would fit the normal timeline for a Feb. 19 Election Day.
It seems we’ve also got a problem with many ballots being declared invalid (for both parties), due to the requirement that the voter check a box for the appropriate “Party Oath” certifying either “I’m a Democrat…” or “I’m a Republican…” and swearing that I’m not voting in the other party’s primary. Apparently, a lot of people (presumably independent voters) elected to not check either box, or else didn’t notice it, and this has rendered their ballots invalid.
Not in this election. The polls have been all over the place in this race. Two months ago who would have predicted that Mike Huckabee would trounce Rudy Guiliani? The only was to know for sure what the people really want is to count the votes.
Within less than 2 percentage points? That’s the margin we’re talking about here. If McCain had won a big blow-out, sure, call it early, what difference does it make? But the two of them were running neck and neck.
Those nationwide polls use careful methodologies to get that level of accuracy and even then they’re sometimes wildly wrong. Suppose if **Squink ** is right and the missing returns mostly come from mountain precincts. Don’t you think that it’s likely that those rural voters might have followed the pattern we’ve seen with rural voters across the country, i.e. break for Huckabee? A scientific poll would take things like that into account. Just cutting off the count doesn’t.
I’m in Okanogan county (but did the Democrat caucus). From what the guy running the caucus said, the vote-by-mail was because our county had neither the funds nor the infrastructure to maintain so many polling places (in such an expansive area). I doubt that King County could claim a similar thing.
Yeah, this seems likely to have happened. Of course, it doesn’t affect the Democrats, as the primary doesn’t count.
Some internationally famous but now deceased dictator is reputed to have once said that it wasn’t so important to control the vote as it was to control the vote counting. We may have seen that sort of thing before in out country’s history. It may have been the same party.
Not to be a smartass, but we aren’t talking about Afghanistan here. I’m sure that even in the remote backcountry of Washington State they have cars to transport the ballots to the county courthouse and they have phones, faxes, and emails to report the results…
I grew up following West Virginia politics and the late counties were never the remote ones with paper ballots. The late ones were the urban counties with the voting machine/counter/lever malfunctions. The rural ones always had the old ladies count the vote and report them within two hours of the polls’ closing…