(From the diaries. Our Electoral Scoreboard gets their numbers from the AP, and they are obviously lagging the county results. I'll verify next week when everyone is back from vacation, but it appears that the AP is now only updating when states issue final certifications, which is why a county to county review of votes like CB8421 has done is pretty cool -- kos)
OK, lots of stuff going on in the real world, the election has been over for 3 weeks, and it's time to move on. Except, I've been tracking this since election night, and I think it's worth seeing where we end up. And since none of the news sites are updating anything any more, and Rachel Maddow is stating "Obama won by 7 million votes", when my totals show he won by at least 9.1 million votes, I thought it was time for another update.
Please, don't ask for links. I've gone to at least 500 individual county web sites (at least it feels that way, at a minimum it's every county in Ohio, Pennsylvania, California, as well as the biggies in states like Colorado, Nebraska, Washington, Oregon, Arizona, Nevada, Illinois, Kansas, and Utah). So here is what I have as of now:
<div class="indent">
Total votes: 130,222,663 Update: (now 130,603,983)
Obama: 68,724,397 Update: (now 68,953,645)
McCain: 59,599,875 Update: (now 59,734,373 )
Margin: 9,124,522 Update: (now 9,219,272)
Percent margin: 7.00% (52.77% to 45.77%)
Update: (now 7.06%, 52.80% to 45.74%)</div>
One important item to note -- where available, I have included write ins in the totals by county. So roughly 1.5% of total votes were for third party candidates or write-ins.
Another important note -- none of these totals include over-votes.
So, since write-ins plus over votes are probably worth about 0.25% of the total, most final reported numbers, if they don't include these (which they probably won't), will understate total turnout by 250-300k.
The following states appear to be certified / final:
<div class="indent">
Delaware
Florida
Georgia
Hawaii
Iowa
Idaho
Louisiana
Maryland
Michigan
Montana
North Carolina
New Mexico
Rhode Island
South Carolina
Texas
Virginia
Vermont
Wyoming</div>
The states with lots of missing votes appear to be:
<div class="indent">
Illinois
Ohio
New York
Pennsylvania</div>
And California just seems to keep counting and counting and counting!
As a final note, anyone live in Montana? If so, can you contact the board of elections in Broadwater county and ask what happened to over 1,000 votes there? They somehow dropped from preliminary total of 2,778 to 1,200 or so in the final certification.
I think total turnout will end up close to 132 million, and Obama will top 69 million easily, and still has a shot at 70 million. It will never make the news at this point, but I think it's still important to note.
Yes, 69.5 million votes and a 9+ million margin is a mandate.
Update on Broadwater county:
The clerk emailed me back and indicated they didn't add back in some of the regular votes to the provisional and absentee ballots, so what they provided to the state was wrong. The lady was very apologetic. She's going to send me the correct totals.
Not to try to make this into a huge example of activism or anything like that, but I think a lot of people in government are just doing the best they can and make mistakes. It's up to us to be vigilant, and for them to be honest when mistakes are made. I think this is a good example of how that should work, even if it's completely meaningless in the overall scheme of things (i.e. didn't change the outcome of the election, etc.)
And a huge THANKS to kos for putting this on the main page!