| Ohfergawdsake. And John Quincy Adams was selected not elected. Give it up, why dontcha? |
Democratic challenger Sen. John Kerry has conceded, President Bush has laid out his plans for a second term and New Mexico still does not know who won the election in the sparsely populated state.
| Does anybody who doesn't spend 23 hours a day on DemocraticUnderground give a rat's patou? |
New Mexico is the only state that does not have a clear-cut winner in the presidential vote, and state officials were red-faced over the slow count. The state had vowed to speed up counting ballots after it took about a month to tally the vote in the 2000 presidential race, where Democrat Al Gore beat Bush by 366 votes.
| That worked well, didn't it? |
Bush has about 373,000 votes to 365,000 for Kerry with most of the ballots counted, and several media outlets have projected Bush winning New Mexico's five electoral votes. On Friday, all of New Mexico's counties had to complete a count in their regions, but one rural county still had problems and did not meet the deadline.
"Curly, what comes after 4,978?"
"I dunno, Slim. I've never counted that high." |
The secretary of state's office said Bush's lead over Kerry has narrowed to about 6,800 votes, according to initial tallies of the provisional ballots submitted to the office on Friday.
| That prob'ly means a recount will be called for... |
The main problems this time were the narrow margin between Bush and Kerry, troubles sorting through provisional ballots and not learning from the 2000 count, critics said. It will still take more than 10 days to find out who took the last state up for grabs in the Nov. 2 election. "I will not be declaring a winner until Nov. 23," said New Mexico Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron.
| Let us know if anything happens, okay, Becky? And don't let us know if nothing happens. |
About 750,000 people voted in New Mexico, and Republicans said money that should have gone to getting the vote counted ended up in a marketing campaign aimed at getting out the vote in the state run by Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson.
| "Well, hell! The money was just sitting there, and nobody was using it..." |
"The counties were unprepared for the volume of voters because the money wasn't there," said New Mexico Republican Party Executive Director Greg Graves.
| That makes sense. Not a lot of sense, but sense. Of a sort. |
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