Super Tuesday Early Returns!

Breaking! Obama Crushes Clinton with 75% of the vote!

That’s right….ok, ok…this is out of….100 total votes of expatriates living in Indonesia. But hey, we’ll take what we can get!

Of course, the voting is not going smoothly in places.

My husband and I went to vote for Obama this morning in South Jersey. Our precinct has only recently changed from the old voting machines to new touch machines.

He went into the machine and noticed that there was a red X listed next to Clinton. He pushed the X next to Obama and while he was looking for the button to push to record his vote, the X for Obama disappeared and the red X for Clinton came on again. So he complained to the poll worker and then went ahead and pushed Obama and then quickly pushed the Vote button before it could reset to Clinton.

We called the Obama folks to let them know.

Who knows who you are voting for when there is no paper trail.

No, I am not claiming “fraud” but rather that these machines are wacko. In Illinois (at least in Peoria) we have machines that print out a paper ballot that you can actually see prior to casting your final vote.

And lest you think that I am getting paranoid: no one would deliberately set up machines in this way; fraud is best done in a way in which you cannot detect it.

And yes, we are having our local problems as well.

Eyebrows McGee is reporting that she encountered a huge problem when she went to vote: She was given a ballot with only national races. She contacted the Peoria Election Commission and was given this explanation:

The Peoria Election Commission, when I called, informed me that this is a special case for people who’ve moved precincts within the last 30 days and that it was poll worker error that I was given the incorrect ballot. They also told me this was a SYSTEM-WIDE PROBLEM that they’ve had many calls about today, and have workers out trying to “fix” the poll worker error on the fly.

About Obama: he has some supporters he probably wish he didn’t have: me, some scientists and other atheistic math teachers.

From the scientist:

It’s Super Tuesday, and I’m about to go cast my vote for Barack Obama. Although both he and Hillary would be enormously better for the country than anyone the Republicans have to offer, I (along with my fellow political elites) think he offers the best chance to break away from a certain kind of corrosive political mindset that characterizes our present system. As just a single example, see this post by Katherine at Obsidian Wings, about Hillary’s proud assertion that “Anybody who committed a crime in this country or in the country they came from has to be deported immediately, with no legal process,” to great applause. I suppose that it sounds good to deport people who commit crimes. But how precisely can we be sure that they really did commit a crime, if there is no legal process? It’s not a thoughtful policy — it’s just a cheap trick to take advantage of some anti-immigrant sentiment, since that’s what seems to be riling up people in the heartland this year. I would like to get past that.

Nevertheless! I’m writing this post to get on the record my annoyance with Obama’s main theme, one beloved of politicians since back in Athens: “Change.” [...]

The key is that you want to have directed change, not generic change. The way that you change things really does matter! And I think, electioneering slogans notwithstanding, that the kind of change Obama represents is a good one: toward a more sensible diplomacy, a less confrontational politics, and a more compassionate society here at home. It won’t be easy, of course — you can lower the entropy of an open system, but only by doing work.

All of which reminds us why politicians so rarely have physicists in their inner circle of advisers.

Go to the article to read the comments; many are funny.

Now for the brown skinned atheist math teacher who lives in Illinois (no, not me!)

I’m voting later tonight. Barack. Easiest vote ever cast.

If you’re an independent voter, listen to lawyer Eddie Tabash talk about the dangers we face with another conservative president and a Supreme Court that could be heading toward disaster with the next appointment.[...]

Oh boy, with supporters like these, he is doomed!

Republicans
Score one for Huckabee!

Huckabee won the West Virginia Caucus

West Virginia Republicans have one of these totally screwed-up systems for determining how delegates will be allotted: 18 of 30 delegates are being determined today at a convention. The winner? Mike Huckabee, with 52%.

After the first vote, Mitt Romney led with 41% to Huckabee’s 33%, but on the second, Romney was only able to get up to 47%. Marc Ambinder has one explanation for that:

But sources say that representatives for John McCain called many of his reps in WV and asked them to vote for Huckabee…in order to thwart Romney on the second ballot.

And you thought that the Democratic race is nasty? Funny, I think that McCain is a great candidate and that Huckabee is ok (for a woo), but many Republicans hate both of them.