ABQjournal: Mistake Found In Hand-Tally Totals:
Close observers of Bernalillo County's ongoing vote count may have noticed that the number of hand-tallied early voting ballots jumped from 642 to 696 late last week.
These are ballots cast at Bernalillo County's early voting sites but for some reason were rejected by the county's new electronic tabulators, requiring that they be hand-tallied by the county's Early Voting Board.
"Human error" temporarily misplaced 3,300 Grant County ballots.--AbqJournal Newsreader
On election night, Grant County elections officials were telling the Silver City Sun-News that this year's election was the smoothest in that county's history. The biggest problem poll workers reported was with voters walking off with pencils for the state's new paper ballots, the Sun-News reported last Wednesday.
Then on Thursday, the Sun-News reported that voter turnout in Grant County was running about 28 percent, with unofficial results showing that there were 7,195 votes cast out of 25,455 registered voters in the county.
Grant County Clerk Howie Morales said at the time that he didn't know why voting was so thin, speculating that voters may have been leery of long lines at the polls and decided to take a pass this year, the Sun-News reported.
Morales said in Thursday's story that the only glitch reported on Election Day was the failure of a data disk in an early-voting machine in Bayard which was quickly compared to paper backup rolls and no votes were lost.
In three contested races on the local ballot, the Democrats swept Republicans by a three-to-two margin, the Sun-News said.
But as vote-counters tallied results during a canvass on Thursday, elections officials discovered that more than 3,000 votes were missing from election-night results, the Sun-News reported in last Saturday's editions.
Provisional ballots not immediately tabulated--Santa Fe New Mexican
ALBUQUERQUE -- Election workers painstakingly analyzed 2,698 provisional and 1,058 in-lieu of ballots Monday in the tightly contested U.S. House race between Democrat Patricia Madrid and Republican incumbent Heather Wilson.
It was another day of slow progress, and election officials said they didn't expect to know until today, or possibly Wednesday, how many of the 3,756 ballots would be disqualified -- the critical factor because of the effect of disqualified ballots on Madrid's chances.
Wilson, R-N.M., led by 1,487 votes in her bid for a fifth term representing the Albuquerque-area 1st Congressional District.
Wilson declared victory two days after last week's election, based on calculations showing Madrid would need to win 68 percent of remaining provisional ballots to gain the lead. For each disqualified ballot, the required percentage climbs higher.
Democrats have said they expect Madrid to reduce her margin in the provisional ballot count, while Republicans believe there is no way Madrid can overtake Wilson
Bernalillo County election officials refused to disclose how many provisionals had been disqualified as of Monday afternoon.
Technorati Tags: Bernalillo, CD 1, Congress, Democrats, Elections, Heather Wilson, New Mexico, news, NM, Patricia Madrid, Politics, Republicans, Voting
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