Something is rotten in the state of GeorgiaFollow

Presidential vote total: 3,852,074
Senatorial vote total: 3,686,019

I could believe 20,000 people not voting for a senator.

I have a bit tougher time swallowing 150,000 people not voting for a senator.

I didn't have any problems with my Diebold touch screen, although I was annoyed there was no obvious "undo" button when I unwittingly picked the incumbent for Sheriff (I had to change it at the end.) The layout of the ballot is such that it's glaringly obvious if you don't pick anyone for a race. It's also a pain in the **** to write in a candidate on the touch screens.

Seems we're headed to a runoff anyway. I wonder if we can borrow a UN election monitoring team to make sure there's no hanky panky this time around?

Was it a peach? I bet it was a peach!


Isn't that how they make Peach Schnapps?

Our local elections here are nonpartisan, so there isn't even an option for "straight down the ticket" of any party since there are no parties for city council, judges, etc.

I'm not sure about the rest of the state.

But there were three parties running for the Senate, and we're now headed for a runoff in December.

That doesn't sound like a bad thing, except that 170,000 votes is 4.3% of the vote. In a race where the difference between the two primary candidates was 3% and that all went to the third party candidate, that is literally the difference between winning and losing if they were all votes for the other guy.

A runoff sounds like a more fair solution than a recount EXCEPT for the fact that thousands of people who would bother casting ballots for the Presidential race won't bother for the senate seat. It seems as if they wanted to shave the percentage off the leading candiate just enough to trigger the runoff (automatic runoff if less than 50% -- he was in at 49.8%) so that in December when the runoff occurs, the incumbent can win with a much more comfortable majority -- since all those pesky black people that turned out for Obama won't bother for the white Democrat Jim Martin.

Not having typical numbers from other states handy (and not really feeling like researching it), I can't say if this is unusual or not. I can certainly understand, especially in this election that there might be a lot of people who just voted for president and perhaps not much more. I suspect that there are a lot of people who only care about the national stuff, or the local stuff, but I have no idea how significant that number might be in this particular case.