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It's Over

Let's look at the hard data:

11477 of 11477 precincts - 100 percent

George W. Bush (i) Rep 2,794,346 - 51 percent
John F. Kerry Dem 2,658,125 - 49 percent
Michael Badnarik NP 14,125 - 0 percent
Michael Peroutka NP 11,606 - 0 percent

Bush leads with 136,221 votes.

According to this site, there are only 135,149 provisional ballots outstanding.

That means there is a 1,072 vote difference in favor of Bush if every single one of those ballots was a vote for Kerry.

This election is over. Thank you and good morning.

Posted by Brian on November 3, 2004 7:37 AM |

Comments

Umm, that's just the provisional ballots.

Perhaps you forgot of these things called "absentee ballots" which also need to be counted? :-)

The election is NOT necessarily over. I don't doubt that Bush will win it, but declaring victory while things are so close is still premature.

Posted by: Derek | November 3, 2004 9:55 AM

I was under the impression that the absentee ballots were being counted last night. That is what the Secretary of State for Ohio stated last night. So, the only remaining ballots, besides the provisionals would be the military ballots, no?

Posted by: Jason | November 3, 2004 10:03 AM

Derek, even the most optimistic "outstanding vote counts" show that Kerry would have to pull at least 90%+ in order to pull out a squeaker victory.

Some physicist figured out what the odds were this morning...

A physics Ph.D. candidate at a very respectable university: "Mr. Derbyshire---I felt a strong need to actually figure out John Kerry's odds of winning Ohio in a somewhat rigorous fashion. Not too promising for the Kerry campaign: I figure there are 175000 provisional ballots out there, as that seems to be the high end of official estimates. If we assume that each has a 50% chance of being counted (and that's way high, it's really probably more like 15-20%) then having more ballots than Bush's margin of victory is a 360-sigma event, which comes out to a probability of 2.8*10^-28145. [That's a number with 28,144 zeros to the right of the decimal point, then some nonzero digits: 2, 8,...---JD] But hey, it could happen. And if every one of those votes goes for John Kerry (probability of this is around 10^-850000 or so) then Kerry might just pull this off."

I think it's over.

Posted by: Brian | November 3, 2004 10:50 AM

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