I know it's just a primary, but I decided to stay up and do scales on the guitar while watching the returns. My thoughts, such as they are:

The Stroger/Claypool drama is interesting stuff to me-- looks like a lot of other areas that used electronic voting didn't have nearly the problems that were in Cook County. Coincidence? David Axelrod had his mad-on at about 12.15. He didn't claim fraud, though.

Contrast that to the Stroger campaign-- at about 11.45, the Stroger people were basically claming that race was the deciding factor, and the reason the returns were being held up was because the Stroger "strongholds" were being silenced. I wish I knew who made that speech-- Louis Guiteriez? I can't remember.

Topinka only won by a little over 6%, with Oberwuss trailing. Her victory is hardly a mandate. And Oberwuss' speech was just the dorkiest thing-- he didn't concede, he didn't say congratulations, he just kept saying that lots and lots and lots of people in Illinois believes the same things he believes. YOU LOST.

Burkett doing his big "Pro Life" speech makes me sick. He and Topinka are going to have a serious diagreement there, I think.

Eisendrath came in better than I thought-- he actually got more than 25%. I wonder if Helmet Hair Rod will be affected by this result? Probably not.

Do you know which electronic voting machines they were using? If it was the Diebold that could explain it, I know that San Diego was banned by the California Sec. of State from using the Diebold machines 'cause of all the problems they had. I think either Maryland or Delaware have banned their use in the state. They have lots of misread errors, there's no paper trail/hard copy log to check against, and in 2003 the president of Diebold stated he planned to help "Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president." (Link). According to paper records the president lost Ohio, according to the Diebold machines he won.

I watched it too as I'm a bit of a dork about politics.

-I'm a little amazed that we still don't know who won the Cook County Board President's race. Um, it's almost noon the day after the election - shouldn't we know already? I voted for Claypool, as I'm tired of John Stroger. He seems power happy these days, and the idea that his successor could just "be selected" weirded me out.

-I am so glad that both Jim Oberweis and Kathy Salvi lost. Maybe someone can tell them to stop running now, people don't like them. This also applies to Kathy Salvi's husband who is the worst of the bunch.

-I like Judy Baar Topinka even though I'm a Democrat. I think she's sassy. I've met her and I liked her in person too. It's going to be interesting to see who I end up voting for in November.

-I like that my district didn't elect Emanuel "Chris" Welch for whatever he was running for. (committeeman?) All his mailings to my house promoted him as the "education candidate" yet all had glaring spelling or grammatical errors. Just a thought - if you want to call yourself the education candidate, try a spell check, or get an English teacher to proofread your mailings. And don't have your email address be "ChrisWelch@hotmail.com." Hotmail? You can't get a better email address than hotmail?

-What's with all the John "Jack" Johnson stuff? Can't we just put "Jack Johnson" on the ballot? Or, make everyone go by their real name. It bugs me.




This election rant paid for by Friends of Kate.

The Stroger campaign just makes my blood boil. I just don't get how people can vote for a 77 year old man who just had an extremely serious stroke, and may have brain damage (not to mention the cancer and by-pass surgery in recent years). A vote for Stroger is basically a vote for an unknown candidate and a political machine...so I suppose I do get it, but I don't like it.

On other notes, I was very happy that Judy Baar took the republican nomination over Oberweis. That dudes a freak. (although I voted in the democratic primary, mostly because I thought it was extremely important to vote for Claypool for the above reasons).

Was also very happy to see that Blago only took 70% of the vote, when his opponent had virtually no money, time, or name recognition. I think he has to be at least a little worried, especially since Judy Baar is a moderate (and basically just a fiscal republican).

You misread that, he's the "Edumacation Candidate." I believe he had Bean spellcheck those mailings...

I don't know if they were Diebold or not. The problem wasn't the make, though. The problem (from what I've read) is that for Cook County, the federal funds to buy the voting machines were only released a couple of months ago. Between the haggling, the ordering, and the installation, there has been NO time to train the judges in the uses of the machines-- most of the Judges were trained in a three-hour session on Monday.

One of the reports on the radio was describing the process at the precinct. All of the votes are collected in little memory modules installed in each machine. When the polls close, a judge is supposed to break the seals on the machines, pull the units, and dump the contents of the units into a central hand-held reader. They plug the reader into a secure line, and transmit the contents of the reader to the Board of Elections.

The units wouldn't plug into the readers properly--either through poor design or inexperience on the part of the judge. The an election judge who couldn't get the memory unit into the reader was actually pounding on it with a book.

I guess there were some rivalry issues too-- they had readers for groups of voting machines; the touch screen judges had their readers, and the paper ballot judges had their readers. Whent the problems started happening, the judges refused to let their readers be used by any other judge who was had a different style voting machine. The files generated by both machines are interchangable.

Who cares?

my vote ballot was the HUGEASS card with a marker that gets fed into the electronic scanner. It made a hell of a lot more sense than the punch-hole method, IMHO. The piece of cardboard they give you to hide your votes was kind of silly...who can really read your vote from that while walking by you? My election judge didn't seem to have a problem with the machine. It was about 6:15, so maybe any kinks they had were ironed out earlier.

I voted Blago because we know what harm he can do, but we don't know what Ed E. will do

I voted Claypool --not just because Stroger is sick, but because Stroger is a crook, and I'd rather have some new blood in the seat rather than some appointed flunky who will only carry out Stroger's orders. (...I hate the race card that inevitably gets pulled in this situation)

As dumb as this sounds. I heard they weren't starting to count again until 1pm today.


She's a conceited bitch. Example: She's double parked her limo on Washington St. in front of city hall. Pops into the Starbucks across the street and claims herself to be too important to wait in line like everyone else... My wife witnessed this little escapade of hers. Sure she's gotta have spunk to play with the big boys but she's as spoiled as the rest of these lifetime governmental cronies... She's no better at all. The fact that she didn't get stung with the Ryan itself is kinda bizarre.

I will probably vote for Topinka simply because she lives in my hometown and elected leaders usually take care of their own. I know, selfish and shortsighted, but having a powerful politician on your side is always a good thing.

As for Burkett, what a fucking tool. Do people really want the same old GOP kool-aid regurgitated back into their face? With all the corruption and misspending being done by current politicos (on both sides), shouldn't you focus on that? No, it's all about abortion. Fuck you, Joe Burkett.



And thank you residents of my town for passing all 3 tax referendums. I never thought I'd be happy to pay higher taxes, but this time I'll gladly pony up. Education is a good thing.





Oh, and fuck you too, John Stroger.

This was my first election here and it was somewhat exciting. For a Republican Judy Baar Topinka seems cool. I don't like her running mate though. He reminds me of my 7th grade science teacher. I hated my 7th grade science teacher. I think it's cool a woman's running, but I still think Blagovich will win the general election. Don't really like him either, but I don't see a woman winning, especially a moderate. Although someone told me most of the Republican governors in Illinois have been moderate. I voted for Claypool over Stroger because I think Stroger will be dead before November.

I think that was Bobby Rush. Louis Guiteriez isn't a black guy. Rush is complaining because he knows that many of Stroger's vote's come from people who vote for him based on his skin color.



That's election law. If a person is known by something other than his legal birth name, it has to be written like that or his legal name only.




She's the only Republican left in Illinois who is elected to high state office.

My brother works for the Board of Elections and I always feel bad for him when it's election time because he works like 16 hour days leading up to election day. I haven't spoken to him yet but I bet he's delirious with exhaustion right now.

I do miss Chicago/Illinois politics down here in Texas. There are no interesting candidates down here, no one cracked out and crazy and off their rocker.

I actually can't wait until I'm back in town and able to part6icipate in the local political process.

Vote Early, Vote Often People!

<edited to add>

I read online that Stroger was admitted into a different hospital and the one that bears his name. How messed up is that, that he won't even get treatment at "his" hospital?

Yeah, I knew rush was bellyaching. But this guy wasn't Rush. The guy I saw last night was Hispanic.

Edit: just heard a story on the radio regarding the Stroger/Claypool race. They'd stopped ballot counting at 6.45 AM, and have only just resumed. Apparently, in every ward, there was at least one malfucntioning voting machine. If that's the case, thousands of ballots are going to have to be counted by hand. The BOE has invited both campaigns to supervise the manual counts. That's gotta be a party.

How can you say that? What about Stanley Marsh III?

Man, I've gotten myself into so much trouble saying that to poll workers here in California.

It kinda goe slike this. No matter what he did. It'd would've looked bad. If he ended up at his own hospital. Which is the main public access health facility in Chicago. It'd look bad because he'd be taking up room that could'v been used for someone who doesn't have the health coverage he does. The hospital where he was taken had all his medical records and such. If I were in that situation. I'd likely go for the place where my doc was too.




duh.

Claypool concedes contest to Stroger

Tribune staff reports
Published March 22, 2006, 4:10 PM CST


Update: Forrest Claypool this afternoon conceded the Cook County Board presidential election to incumbent John Stroger. Details to come.

Chicago and Cook County election officials say that they will resume counting ballots at 1 p.m. today following a confusing night plagued with problems connected to the new electronic machines that voters used for the first time in Tuesday's primary races.

Officials stopped counting ballots early this morning with 88 percent of suburban Cook County precincts reporting and 85 percent of Chicago precincts reporting.

The outstanding votes made it difficult to decide who won the hotly contested Democratic primary between Cook County Board President John Stroger and challenger Forrest Claypool. But Claypool supporters indicated they were not optimistic about the final results once ballot counting resumed this afternoon.

Stroger appeared to hold a hard-to-overcome lead. With slightly over 87 percent of precincts counted overall in Cook County and Chicago, Stroger led Claypool by more than 21,000 votes. Stroger had 256,552, or 52.14 percent, to Claypool's 235,494, or 47.86 percent, in unofficial returns.

Election officials reported relatively widespread problems with the cellular system that was supposed to transmit results from more than 3,000 polling places to downtown election offices.

In previous elections, officials could resolve the problems by phone, walking poll workers through the procedure. But because the problems were so common Tuesday, officials ordered precincts to stop trying to transmit remotely and bring cartridges to the central office, according to Scott Burnham, a spokesman for Cook County Clerk David Orr.

As of early this morning, Burnham said suburban Cook is missing cartridges for between 175 and 200 of the precincts. He said officials are trying to track down those missing cartridges, which are likely secured at central warehouses or polling places.

Despite Stroger's lead, top officials from Claypool's campaign told reporters this morning that they were waiting to see more vote totals before making a definitive statement about the results.

Claypool campaign manager Marj Halperin and chairman Mike Quigley said they still had too many questions about what parts of the county the outstanding ballots were from as well as how they were handled on election night.

Quigley said that election officials early Wednesday morning could not tell him which precincts had been counted, which were ones had sent ballots to a warehouse and which was were under lock and key elsewhere.

"That's flying blind," Quigley said. "It's a recipe for real trouble in the future. I don't know if this election will end up being close enough where we have to challenge it or not… Today's message is we would be in a world of hurt if this was an extraordinarily close election."

Based on the numbers that are in so far, Halperin said the Claypool camp does not have great optimism.

"I have to say based on the numbers that are in so far we can see that it's not trending in our direction," Halperin said. "But the problem remains we don't know what numbers we don't have and whether the remaining precincts will continue that trend or another."

Because they don't know what numbers are still outstanding, Halperin said, "I can't now tell when we will know that we have what we need."

Halperin said Claypool was prepared to address the news media "as soon as he has an understanding of the results and something to discuss with you."

"It's just a little early for him to make a definitive statement with all the uncertainty," Quigley added.

Officials with the Stroger campaign were planning a noon press conference.

Stroger officials said they believe that the majority of uncounted city votes are from wards loyal to Stroger. They said even if Claypool picks up significantly more suburban votes, it won't offset Stroger's advantage in the city.

"At worst we think the current trends will hold," one Stroger campaign official said.

Mayor Richard Daley also declined to declare Stroger the winner pending certification of the results, but he said the incumbent's support stemmed from his accomplishments as president and from friendships built over years in politics.

The mayor cited Stroger's support for development of the new county hospital, a Near West Side AIDS clinic and the new domestic violence court.

"John Stroger is a very kind and considerate man," Daley said. "He made a lot of friends over many, many years. People were voting for him, not against anyone else."

Daley said he believes that Stroger's health played no role in determining how voters cast their ballots.

The mayor also downplayed the Election Day problems, voicing no alarm or surprise.

"It's a whole new system," he said. "You have to see what happens. They will be able to work out if there are any problems with it. They will be able to correct it."





Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune

Forrest must be thinking "If I play nice now, maybe I'll get in good when the guy croaks."

Are you kidding me?

KINKY!

And Musicgurl, you got Tom DeLay. Considering the way the state's gerrymandered, I bet that you're in his district...

I have no clue who that is...time to hit Google.




Kinky's interesting but I prefer my politicans in trench coats being led from federal buildings by their lawyers or standing on top of city council tables in GIANT hats.

j/k




I probably am in his district, I'll have to check to be sure.

Go to http://www.vote-smart.org/index.htm and enter your zip code. It'll give you your districts there.

If you're in the 10th, vote for Badnarik.

OK, one last thing on the election. On election night I was flipping channels to see what everyone was saying. I came across a Jesse Jackson Jr on some channel or the other. He kept saying "Illinoisans" but he was pronouncing it: Ill-in-noys-ans. He was pronouncing the "S". What, is he new to this state or something?

No, he's just an idiot.

Why the hell did we need to invent the word "Illinoisans"? Isn't that what "Illini" is for?

JJ Jr.'s a big Soof-Yan fan.