Thanks Shaula.

I donated some $$$. Anything to get rid of that freak Allen.

Our virtues are usually only vices in disguise.

Democrats have taken four Senate seats from the Republicans. Two races, in Montana and Virginia, remain too close to call, although Democrats hold narrow leads in both states.
In the case of a 50-50 tie in the Senate, Vice President Dick Cheney would cast the deciding vote in favor of Republican control.

The Montana Senate race won't be known until at least 7 a.m. Eastern, according to the Associated Press. Results from Yellowstone County, including the city of Billings, have yet to be counted. See on our interactive map where the Democrats made gains.

In Virginia, the winner of the Senate race cannot be determined until final absentee ballots are counted on Wednesday. A recount of the results is likely, which could mean the final result would not be known until December, experts said.

MarketWatch

Allen Awaits Vote Review; Webb Begins Transition in Virginia Senate Race
AP, Wednesday, November 08, 2006

RICHMOND, Va. — Sen. George Allen's campaign said Wednesday it will wait for a full review of the Virginia vote as Democrat Jim Webb moved to assemble a transition team with about an 8,000-vote lead over Allen.

"The conclusion of the canvass will be the final official results," said Ed Gillespie, the former Republican National Committee chairman and now an adviser to Allen. He said the state had until Nov. 14 to complete the canvas.

Representives from both campaigns and party officials were at many polling places Wednesday as the canvas was under way.

• Check Your State, Check Your Race by clicking BALANCE OF POWER dropdown menu above.

Webb's campaign said he was putting together a transition team.

Webb spokeswoman Kristian Denny Todd said the campaign respects that the canvassing process is continuing, but said that as a practical matter, "the vote's been counted and Jim won."

...more

In Virginia, Webb Is Confident He Will Prevail

By JOHN BRODER and IAN URBINA
NYT

RICHMOND, Va., Nov. 8 — Jim Webb, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Virginia who leads Senator George Allen, a Republican, by about 7,000 votes, began planning his transition to the Senate today, confident that the margin would survive state scrutiny or any legal challenge, aides said.

If the Webb victory holds up, it will provide the final seat Democrats need to seize control of the Senate. With Jon Tester, a Democrat, unseating Senator Conrad Burns, a Republican, in Montana, the Democrats are now one seat short of a 51-49 majority.

Some members of Mr. Allen’s camp suggested Tuesday night and today that he would challenge the vote count, which amounts to less than one-half of 1 percent of the more than 2.3 million votes cast. The process in Virginia is complex and time-consuming and results of a formal recount might not be known until nearly Christmas.

But both sides were closely monitoring the first step of the process, a precinct-by-precinct canvass of Tuesday’s vote. That process should be completed no later than next Tuesday.

A Webb spokeswoman said that Virginia’s vote-counting procedure is methodical and accurate and expressed confidence that Mr. Webb’s margin would hold steady or grow.

“The bottom line is the votes have been counted and Jim Webb has won,” said Kristian Denny Todd, a Webb aide. “It could have gone the other way, but it didn’t. We’re on top and that’s the way it’s going to stay.”

She said that “Senator-elect Webb” is consulting with advisers and planning to take his seat in the Senate in January.

Ed Gillespie, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, is in Richmond to monitor the vote-certification process and advise the Allen campaign. “The conclusion of the canvass will be the official result,” he said at a news briefing today. He said he believed a count of provisional ballots and a review of the state’s voting machines would turn up additional votes for Mr. Allen.

He accused Democrats of using lawyers to try to affect the outcome.

A protracted recount in Virginia is a scenario that many voting experts feared, with control of Congress hinging on a razor-thin margin in one Senate race, bringing a replay of the bitter litigation of the 2000 presidential election, which resulted in a drawn-out recount and bitter litigation.

All of it occurs in relatively uncharted legal territory where it is unclear what a recount really means in jurisdictions where there is no paper trail and where the actual number of eligible provisional ballots remains in flux.

Barring surrender by one side, it looked like a drawn-out process could extend into December.

Voting experts say the current predicament is illustrative of the pitfalls of voting in a post-paper era after a broad overhaul meant to avoid the hanging chads controversy of the 2000 presidential contest.

In Virginia, if the margin is less than 1 percent, the losing candidate must request a recount, which would not begin until Nov. 27.

The recount in Virginia is unlikely to resolve all potential legal issues. In Virginia “recounts” consist of re-tabulating the votes from the existing counts to ensure that the end-of-the-day tallies were summed accurately. Virginia uses a mix of optical-scan machines and touch-screen machines, with 11 different systems in total, across more than 130 jurisdictions, amounting to more than 9,000 machines. Touch-screen machines print out full tallies after all voting is done, and unless these printouts are unclear, officials generally do not rerun the machines. With optical-scan machines, only unclear ballots are run back through the scanner.

While all of the state’s absentee ballots were already counted, election officials said today that they did not know how many voters had cast provisional ballots, which are used when a voter does not have proper identification or does not appear on a voter registration rolls.

In Virginia, provisional ballots cast in the wrong precinct are thrown away. Voting experts say if the number of provisional ballots deemed ineligible is greater than the number of ballots needed to tip the race, there may be litigation over which ballots should be eligible. In 2004, of three million total ballots, 4,609 were provisional and only 728 ended up being counted.

RAW STORY

Published: Wednesday November 8, 2006

AP has called the Senate for Democrats, after reporting that Democratic candidate Jim Webb has won in Virginia. Democrats will control the Senate, 51-49.

MORE SOON

( ... Link ... )

WASHINGTON (CNN -- Democrats will control both the House and Senate after Jim Webb won a Senate seat by about 7,200 votes in Virginia, The Associated Press reported Wednesday.

Webb will have a formal press conference Thursday morning to officially declare victory, an aide said.
A source close to Sen. George Allen says the Republican incumbent wants to make clear he "has no intention of dragging this out

meets the windshield of reality.

It is, indeed, a sunny day.

It is now 99.5% reality.

Now you can just wait that Bush declares a new constitution which says that The congress doesn't exist anymore.

-- 101 ways to avoid the subjunctive mood

Who will be the new senate majority leader?

I did inhale.

By Tim Craig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 9, 2006; Page A51

The outcome of Virginia's U.S. Senate race could now hinge on the state's system for counting and recounting election votes.

With Democrat James Webb leading by about 7,300 votes, Sen. George Allen (R) can request a recount if he is trailing by roughly the same amount after the official results are certified Nov. 27. But before Allen decides whether to pursue a recount, the state must complete a routine process conducted after every election for turning more than 2 million electronic, absentee and provisional ballots into a final, official vote total.

"We feel very prepared," said James Alcorn, policy adviser to the State Board of Elections, which oversees the local governments that do most of the vote-counting.

Attorneys for Webb and Allen rushed to county election boards across the state yesterday to monitor the canvass. Although nearly all of the votes have been counted once, local election officials will retabulate the results to look for possible accounting or math errors.

Local election boards will also decide which provisional ballots should be counted. Those are usually given to voters who show up at the wrong precinct or demand to vote even though their name is missing from registration files.

State officials could not determine yesterday how many provisional ballots were cast. But Allen's attorneys said there could be as many as 6,000.

Webb and Allen advisers said yesterday that the margin separating the candidates is almost certain to change during the canvass. It is not uncommon for a candidate to gain several thousand votes, according to elected officials and a review of election results.

Last year, Attorney General Robert F. McDonnell (R) woke up the day after the election with a lead of about 3,300 votes. When the canvass ended the next Monday, his lead had dwindled to about 350 votes. In the 1993 governor's race, when Democrat Mary Sue Terry ran against Allen, she picked up about 4,000 votes between Election Day and the certification.

"It all depends on how many math errors there are," McDonnell said yesterday. "Things get transposed, people read things wrong or call them in wrong, so there could be significant swings over the next week."

But Democrats say they doubt that Allen can collect enough votes to put him in the lead.

"We have great confidence in the Virginia process. We have never had a winner change from election night," said former governor Mark R. Warner (D).

Earlier in the day, Allen adviser Ed Gillespie told reporters in Richmond that Allen wouldn't concede or make a decision about a recount until the canvass is completed.

"The fact is, we always knew this was going to be close," Gillespie said.

In Virginia, voters use either touch-screen voting machines or ballots that can be optically scanned. When polls close, precincts report their results to the local boards. The boards also count the absentee ballots and send both sets of results, which are unofficial, to the state elections board.

The day after the election, the canvass begins to put "new, fresh eyes" on the tallies submitted the night before. The canvass, which makes the vote tallies official, lasts seven days. The results are certified on the fourth Monday of November, Nov. 27 this year.

Lee Goodman, an attorney for the Republican Party of Virginia, is helping to oversee Allen's legal effort. He said yesterday that some small cities have already completed their canvasses.

At the Loudoun County registrar's office yesterday, eight canvassers pored over documents and receipts in a tiny supply room while officials from the local Republican and Democratic parties looked on. Their desks were strewn with envelopes, calculators and data sheets, as if they were working on their taxes.

Working in pairs, they logged the little mistakes they found -- missing signatures, blanks that should have been filled in and other errors made by sleepy-eyed poll workers who had filled out the paperwork late Tuesday.

"To us, it's just another election," said Til Bennie, vice chair of the county's electoral board. "We always do a thorough job, but this time it's especially important."

When the results are certified, the losing candidate has 10 days to request a recount if the winning margin is less than 1 percent. If the winner's lead is less than one-half of 1 percent, the state will pay for the recount, election officials said; otherwise, the contester would have to pay. Webb leads Allen by less than three-tenths of a percent.

A three-judge panel would then decide whether to grant the recount and how it should proceed. The panel would have one judge from the Circuit Court of Richmond and two others from other jurisdictions selected by the chief justice of the state Supreme Court.

There have been only two statewide recounts in Virginia.

Last year, McDonnell (R) edged state Sen. R. Creigh Deeds (D-Bath) by 323 votes after a recount to become attorney general. In the 1989 gubernatorial election, a recount confirmed Democrat L. Douglas Wilder's victory over J. Marshall Coleman, the Republican candidate.

Larry Framme, a lawyer who headed Deeds's and Wilder's recount efforts, said residents shouldn't conjure up images of the Florida recount during the 2000 presidential race. That manual recount, by hand in some cases, occurred in a state with several methods of voting, including computer punch cards that had flaws.

"With current voting procedures, it's just not realistic to make [up the deficit] in a recount," Framme said. "The canvass is where the difference needs to be made up."

In Virginia, "a voter's eligibility to vote or any alleged irregularities cannot be called into question during a recount," according to the Board of Elections Web site.

"You would go back and look at the same thing looked at during the canvass," said Marc Elias, a lawyer for Webb's campaign.

But Alcorn said a panel of judges could order a recount of all optically scanned ballots "if a printout is not clear or at the request of the court."

Alcorn said "it would be up to lawyers to decide" what that provision means, because it has never been used.

Staff writer Sandhya Somashekhar contributed to this report.

POSTED: 2:15 pm EST November 9, 2006
UPDATED: 2:28 pm EST November 9, 2006

http://www.wxii12.com/news/10283000/detail.html

ALEXANDRIA, Va. -- Virginia U.S. Sen. George Allen conceded defeat in his re-election bid, sealing the Democrats' takeover of the Senate and concluding a dramatic fall for a one-time top-tier presidential contender, according to a close adviser to the Republican.
The adviser spoke Thursday afternoon on condition of anonymity because Allen's campaign hadn't yet publicly confirmed his intentions. Democrat Jim Webb had claimed victory after election returns early Wednesday morning showed him with a narrow lead.

Allen opted against demanding a recount after initial canvassing of Tuesday's results failed to significantly alter Webb's lead of about 7,200 votes out of nearly 2.4 million ballots cast. The results won't be official until they are certified by the State Board of Elections on Nov. 27.

Allen will concede in about 15 minutes.