Wonder why the nation was kept waiting into Wednesday to learn
which party may be dominant in the United States Senate? The state
of gold and silver: Montana. And lord only knows if the result is
knowable even now!
Yellowstone County, Billings and environs, is the state's most
populous, and the County Election Administrator, Duane Winslow,
says a new software program fooled him. Absentee ballots are to be
counted first -- about 20,000 for the county. After these were
tabulated, Winslow says he was supposed to hit a "zero out" button
on the three electronic counting machines to clear the way for
tabulating the regular ballots. He is quoted as saying he thinks he
hit the button on one machine but may have neglected the other
two.
"It's just a mistake I made," he says.
About 12:40 a. m. Mountain Time, Winslow figured the hell with
it, no telling how many absentee ballots may have been counted
twice, along with the regular ballots, so he decided to do a
complete recount! What staff was left in the courthouse would
probably be there until dawn, leading to the perplexed faces on all
those anchors in the East.
Compounding the Montana dilemma is a new state law that allows
election-day registration. This led to long lines of
registrant-voters waiting long after the 8 p.m. closing time. (The
last ballot was cast in Gallatin County at 11:55 p m.) The
statewide database of voters had a technical glitch that prevented
two counties from registering new voters for about an hour. The
solution: provisional ballots.
Add to the new same-day registration wrinkle and the absentee
surge the need to feed some computer cards into the system by hand
because of a glitch in automation and you get an idea of why the
Treasure State was late in electing a U.S. Senator.
topics:
Law, NATO
