10:06 PM - GOP Takes House, Dems Still Have Senate
9:39 PM - Ken Ivory Looks Promising in Utah's House District 47 Race He currently leads with 60% of the vote. Ken would be an extremely welcome addition to the Utah Legislature.
9:31 PM - iCaucus.org Bets on the Right Horses Several of iCaucus's endorsed candidates have won tonight.
9:24 PM - Angle is Weird but Reid is Weirdest As much as I realize that Reid is good at picking his competition, and Sharron Angle is sort of strange, having her in the Senate would be an improvement over Harry Reid.
9:17 PM - Republicans will take majority in House The AP reports that of the 40 seats Repubs needed, they already have 34.
9:02 PM - I Can Smell Another Tea Party Victory - With 82% of precincts reporting, Pat Toomey has now pulled into the lead against Joe Sestak by 33,000 votes. Percentage-wise, though, it's still 50-50.
8:58 PM - Herbert Leads Corroon, Even in Salt Lake County Herbert's lead in SL County is slight, but he leads big in almost every other county that has reported so far.
8:55 PM - Polls Show that Alaska Write-In Lisa Murkowski was the most popular candidate there by about 2 percentage points. The only problem??? How many people who like her will actually write her in? I predict an easy win in Alaska by Joe Miller.
8:44 PM - Russ Feingold is ousted. Exit polls are showing that one half of the infamous McCain/Feingold duo will not win his election race. That is fitting for someone whose name is one that graces the worst campaign finance law in the history of the world.
8:40 PM - Chris Vanocur is reporting that Sam Granato is giving his concession speech...
8:37 PM - Granato Neck and Neck with Lee, But Not Really Currently Lee has 50% and Granato has 46%, but with the heavy weight of Salt Lake and Carbon Counties. From the trickle of votes from other counties, it's not even close there; Lee will be the big winner.
8:31 PM - Jim Matheson or Morgan Philpot - I'm not in that Utah Congressional district, but if I were, that would have been a hard choice. Philpot would be a great Congressman. I respect Matheson, and he has done a great job in Congress, despite him having thought he needed to falsify his voting record during the campaign and despite the fact that his was the last vote to adjourn the House with out deciding what to do about my taxes going up next year.
5:34 PM - Tea Party Candidate Marco Rubio of Florida is running away with the Senate Race there. Far out!
5:04 PM - Rand Paul Projected as Kentucky Winner. But I think it's too early.
4:43 PM - Rand Paul Out to a Lead In Kentucky, Rand Paul currently holds a 55% to 45% lead over Jack Conway.
4:35 PM - Bizarre or Desperate, Which? Or Neither? Have you ever heard of a president calling up a plethora of talk radio programs and other radio stations and gone on the air to plead with the voters not to destroy everything you've worked to build? President Obama did today.
4:31 PM - A Cool Way to Track the Races that are Important to You. Go to CNN Politics and select the states and races that you want to follow. It builds your very own page so that you don't have to continue searching back and forth for those big races you want to keep tabs on.
4:14 PM - Utah County Voting Glitch Caused by County IT Department It looks like the problem with the electronic voting machines that I experience was pervasive in Utah County. And only some of the precincts allowed their voters to vote by paper ballot. Bummer...
3:32 PM - Oops! Starstruck or Disingenuous? I really like B. J Lawson of North Carolina, and I still hope he wins, but his campaign couldn't possibly have misunderstood that the ad containing a voice that sounded like actor Morgan Freeman was not Freeman but a voice double... Freeman is ticked, and rightly so.
3:24 PM - Getting My National Election Coverage I plan on getting my election coverage mainly from what I expect will be two completely different perspectives tonight: CNN and TownHall.
11:59 AM - Hurrah for the Tea Party of Compromise CNN had an insightful interview with Rand Paul, Republican candidate for Senate in Kentucky. I really hope he wins, because contrary to what the Tea Party haters are promulgating, Tea Party candidates, whose number one issue is to control government spending, really are willing to compromise with liberals. Mr. Paul explained one area where this compromise could produce great spending reduction dividends.
"I do believe national defense is the most important thing the federal government does, but I do think there's waste in the military budget and I'll be one of those to reach across the aisle to the Democrats and say, we will tackle waste throughout the length and breadth of the budget, but I think that's the only compromise that would find enough money to balance the budget."
10:55 AM - More Harry Reid Improprieties - Harry Reid is sounding more desperate. Last week voters reported that Harry Reid was already selected when they went to vote on electronic machines in Clark County, NV. Now, mob bosses in Nevada are pressuring their employees to get out and vote--for Reid. This will be one of the more interesting elections to follow this evening. Sharron Angle is not a great candidate, but she's better than Reid, I think.
9:58 AM - Early Voter Turnout was High - It's good to see that early voter turnout across the state was very high, at least compared to 2006. The Provo Daily Herald noted that it wasn't as high as in 2008, a presidential election year, but it was remarkably strong for an off election cycle. In Utah County, 10,500 people voted early this year, whereas 25,000 people voted early in Utah County in 2008.
8:56 AM - Clearing up a few things with the Utah county elections office. On the way to work I had a great visit with a patient and very helpful woman from the Utah County elections office. She told me that the voting location instructions that were mailed out were mailed to every household instead of just to those who were registered to vote. But if my friends are registered to vote, they can vote provisionally and the elections staff will verify that they indeed are registered, and if so, they will count their ballots.
I also suggested to the elections office representative that the snafu with the voting machines in my precinct wasn't handled very well. She was surprised that, with the machines being down, the pollsters did not immediately offer to let people vote on paper ballots. Obviously some people don't want to vote paper ballots, because those ballots are counted very last late in the evening, but she agreed that it should be made clear than anyone can vote by paper ballot for any reason. She said that she would pass on my suggestion to the Utah County elections staff that better instructions need to be given on managing paper balloting.
8:08 AM - Voter Misinformation. A younger couple, who had lived in my precinct for a year, received a notice from the county (state?) elections office telling them that they could vote at the Santaquin (Utah) City Center. When they got to the check-in table, they were turned away because their names weren't in the voter book. They verified, by their address on the voting precinct map, that they were in the right place. Are they out of luck? Does anyone know if how they can clear up the problem and still be allowed to vote?
7:42 AM Die, Diebold, Die!!! - I got to my polling place this morning at 7:08 and about ten people were just sitting around waiting for the technicians to get even one of the voting machines working. I asked if I could vote on a paper ballot. "Oh...I guess we could do that..." one of the pollsters said. It took them a while to get re-oriented and figure out the manual balloting process, but I saved about 30 voters a lot of time with my suggestion. By the time I left 5 minutes ago, the voting machines were still not working, and it was allegedly a problem all over my voting district.
Paper Ballots Mean Write-Ins. I hate Diebold anyway, because of how easy it is to manipulate electronic voting. Besides, you can't write someone in on an electronic machine, and I wrote in Joel Wright as Utah County Commissioner instead of Lane Henderson or Gary Anderson. I ended up voting in favor of all 4 Constitutional amendments.
You can write-in on the machines. There is a line on every race that says write in. When you push it, it pops up a keyboard on the screen where you can type the name in. Then it takes you back to the vote screen, with your write in choice selected.
ReplyDeleteFrank, you might be interested in this post-election analysis from Chris Floyd. Here's a choice nugget from the article, " The people sense that something is badly wrong; but no one in the system will tell them that it is the system itself that is wrong. Instead, we get these circuses and shams, these diversions and delusions that pass for election campaigns, throwing up a blizzard of false issues and partisan posturing, sound and fury signifying nothing … then when it’s all over, it’s back to business as usual for our bipartisan courtiers, feasting on the bloody swill of empire. "
ReplyDeleteBob: Cool! I'll have to pay closer attention next time--IF the machines are working... ;-)
ReplyDeleteCharles: I have the same fears, especially with John Boehner becoming Speaker of the House. It is my hope, with new Senators like Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and Marco Rubio, as well as like-minded new members of the house that it won't be back to business as usual. I can feel pretty confident that if, in 6 years, nothing has changed, we Utahns will run Mike Lee out of town on the same rail that we did Bob Bennett.
Charles: This article echos those sentiments (http://www.swifteconomics.com/2010/09/17/who-is-tired-of-political-ad-wars-campaign-spending/)
ReplyDelete"Andrew Napolitano so rightly stated:
“I don’t think we have a two-party system in this country, I think we have one party, which is the Big Government party. There’s a Democratic wing that likes welfare and taxes and assaulting our commercial liberties. There’s a Republican wing that likes war and deficits and assaulting our civil liberties.”
The general direction of the country doesn’t change as the House and the Presidency oscillate from one party to another; only the speed and magnitude changes as we chart the same course. With the current state of our system, it has proven to be a misnomer that booting out incumbents will create the positive change necessary."