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IJAM: All the funny names from counting Virginia's 2013 Attorney General votes
On Nov. 5, 2013, the citizens of the state commonwealth of Virginia in the United States voted for their next Attorney General. Well, technically, only about half of the registered voters did. And about half of them voted for State Senator Mark Herring (a Democrat), and about half voted for State Senator Mark Obenshain (a Republican).
Who got more votes? We're still not really sure. We're (or they, the vote-counting folks, are) still counting: correcting tabulation errors, tallying absentee votes, evaluating provisional ballots, and more.
And so far, in the twittersphere, some dedicated election nerds have been chronicling the saga of every precinct and municipality recanvassing their voting machines and counts checking and double-checking the numbers. And they've come up with...nicknames for some discoveries. In a race where at most a few hundred votes have separated the top two vote-getters -- at the end of last night, it was a measly fifteen -- it's been an exciting back-and-forth sometimes, with hashtags such as:
#7CornersSurprise -- a bunch of uncounted absentee ballots were discovered after someone flagged that the absentee return rate for a district in eastern Fairfax County (around the Seven Corners area, I guess?) was much lower (around 50%) than that of its neighbors (around 80%)
#BedfordBlast -- during a series of mostly small adjustments (double-digit vote total corrections) to both candidates, with Herring just a hundred or so votes behind, a heavily Obenshain-supporting county finds a tabulation error that gives Obenshain several hundred more votes
#ShockoeSlipUp -- multiple precincts with tabulation errors, including one with a voting machine that ran into some problems, in Richmond (albeit not in the Shockoe area in Richmond, but the name was deemed too funny to let go)
#DanvilleDisaster -- when someone noticed that in 2008 and 2012, Obama (the Dem candidate for president) got over 12,000 votes in Danville (which would be nearly 60% of the vote), but statewide Dem candidates only got about 5000 votes this year, and a lackluster video of the Dems' Danville campaign office (taken by a Republican operative, fwiw) surfaced, showing them apparently not doing much
Comments
The Republicans in the VA House of Delegates are already introducing new laws to try and curb votes from Deomcrats: http://www.wtop.com/120/3501230/Provisional-ballot-voters-face-obstacles
This entire election was totally bananas. It won't be settled until mid-December at the very earliest. When the Daily Show makes fun of how corrupt and awful your two gubernatorial candidates are, you know something's up: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/11/05/holy-sht-this-is-a-nightmare-the-daily-show-analyzes-virginia-governors-race/
You mean the State Board of Elections? Yeah, I heard about that; it's sad that they're already aiming to gum up the works. AFAIK, the Fairfax County people (including the Republican there) condemned the announcement and decided to let people come as late as tomorrow (Tuesday) to verify their provisional status.
And just for fun:
Virginia AG Race: Election Geeks Creating A New Environment for Close Races?
Election geek is probably the best kind of geek. Public transportation geeks are a close second, I'm gonna say, as long as their observations are put to good use.
Y'know I can't believe I forgot the most obvious one until people pointed it out on Twitter.
The hashtag for the whole Virginia Attorney General's race? #VAAG
I mean:
Not a #VAAG thing, but a #VAG thing...I mean VA-Gov:
http://www.lifesitenews.com/images/sized/images/blog/Virginia_2013_vs_2008-640x512.jpg
As you can see, the ideological inclination of the Republican statewide nominee changes...the map projection of the commonwealth of Virginia.
And just for today, there's the #FairfaxFinale. There was #[municipality name starting with C]Conundrum earlier but that didn't catch on.