Kerry Concedes

As I logged in this morning the announcement that Kerry has conceded came over the news. The President hasn't made his own speach yet, but I have to say I don't think I can possibly express my disappointment.

What I was going to post was a short unscientific mathmatic analysis of the possible effect of Ohio provisional votes. Last night I was a poll worker and my primary task all day was handling the processing of the provisional votes in our precinct. Here near the center of Los Angeles County, our pricenct took in over 500 regular votes with 51 provisional votes being cast - or 9.2% of the total vote. My precinct may or may not have been representative, but if Ohio has only half that many provisional ballets outstanding there would be over 239,000 votes with a margin of 140,000 between the two candidates.

The problem is this, after tons of legal wrangling, the Republican Party was able to install tons of legal "challengers" in the voting places in Ohio. When a challenge is presented to voter legitimacy or the process, the most likely result is that that voter will be shifted to voting provisionally. Therefore it's my opinion, taking a conservative view of things based on my own experience at the polls yesterday, that there are probably well over 200,000 provisional votes outstanding and may in fact be as many as 400,000 votes outstanding - and considering the fact that these challengers were predominantly Republican, most of those votes are probably Democratic, and probably support Kerry.

I could be wrong of course, the evening has been full of wrong estimatations, but I don't think so.
And after ten days we'll find out.

Kerry may have decided that mathematically he couldn't overcome the deficit in Ohio, and choose not to drag the country the ten days of uncertainty, but I think - this isn't over.

Not by a long shot.

Vyan