Life is a State of Mind

One of the more frequent excuses I hear from citizens who choose not to vote is that their vote will not matter. Well, if yesterday’s election proved something, it is that that excuse is completely invalid. As it approaches a full day after polls closed we still have:

• no clear winner of the races for four (yes, 4) United States Senate seats:
  • Alaska where Senator “Tubes” leads by 3,353 votes out of 209,349 votes cast!
  • Georgia where total vote counts seem small for the huge early turnout reported, and Chambliss leads by a very small margin amongst a gigantic sea of votes (this one may go to Georgia’s runoff election rules)
  • Minnesota where less than 500 votes separate the two front runners and nearly three million voted!
  • Oregon where Merkley trails by less than less than 10,000 with over a million cast ballots and many precincts remain uncounted.
• no clear winner of races for at least four (yes, 4) United States Congress seats:
  • CA-04 where only 451 votes separate Brown v McClintock out of over 300,000 cast
  • MD-01 where Kratovil leads by only 915 votes out of over 300,000 cast
  • WA-08 where the fabulous Darcy Burner (who wears the coolest t-shirts in politics) trails Reichert by only 1500 votes and there are many precincts left to count.
  • VA-05 where Perriello is ahead by only 31 votes out of over 300,000 cast!!!! Thirty-One is such a tiny number, and I’ll wager the undervote (the number of voters who voted for President but left Congress choice blank) is greater than 31 several times over in that district.
• it remains unclear if California’s Proposition 8 has passed or not; though the Yes voters (who are voting against equal rights) have a clear lead on election day, there are many absentee ballots to be counted, many more than the margin remaining (though that is large). Thanks to Ben for pointing this one out.
• and though we know who the next President of the United States will be, we are still unable to call the electoral votes for two states (North Carolina and Missouri) and one electoral vote in Nebraska’s 2nd district because the election for president was so close in all of them.

No one can use the excuse that their vote does not count anymore, and we have to do something about verifying our elections; making them more transparent, and easier to validate. We need to nationalize election procedures and rules.

I used information from pollster.com, fivethirtyeight.com, and cnn.com to put this post/diary together; did I miss any other really close races? If so – please let me know.