Alabama -- amendment may hinge on provisional ballots
AP reports: Alabama election officials are preparing to count hundreds - maybe thousands - of ballots that have yet to be tallied from this week's vote and could sway the outcome of a controversial constitutional amendment.
In Jefferson County and elsewhere, workers plan to spend this weekend sorting through voter forms to determine which provisional ballots can be counted and included in official vote totals. The final tally will begin at noon Tuesday.
The results will be critical in determining whether voters approved or rejected Amendment Two, a statewide proposal that would delete segregation-era provisions from Alabama's Constitution but failed in the unofficial, incomplete count by only 2,494 votes out of the 1.38 million cast. ...
The key question concerns numbers: How many provisional ballots exist and how many will ultimately be counted.
If the primary vote is a guide, about half of the provisional ballots cast this week will wind up being counted. Of 977 provisional ballots in that vote, state election officials said 482 were proper and were included in the final tally.
But no one is certain how many provisional ballots are out there locked away in county courthouses. Since counties have not yet been required to determine the number of provisional ballots they had, many haven't. -- Welcome to TimesDaily.com
Amendment Two removed segregationist language from the the 1901 Constitution and repealed an amendment adopted in 1956 that removed the right to a public education. Deposed Chief Justice Roy Moore (one of the few people who was able to run to the right of a Karl Rove candidate) started the drum beat that the reinstatement of the right to a public education would allow an "activist judge" to order the state to raise taxes. Well, you might have well have said it would promote Satanism.
Comments
How can this vote be explained? Was it race? Support for Moore by religious activists? Truly fear of higher taxes to fund the state's underfunded schools by the public? At least one letter to the editor I read yesterday suggested "education is not a right but a choice." Can such an attitude be sustained if one considers the inability of a first grader to make a choice about the school she might attend? In short, this vote seems very difficult to explain in any but the most negative of manners to folks outside of Alabama - and to many of us inside the state as well.
Posted by: Jerry Webster | November 6, 2004 11:34 AM