Why Merkley has won the OR Senate Race

I was planning on posting a diary reviewing the results of Oregon’s elections but that will have to wait until tomorrow.  Due to the VERY close numbers in OR’s Senate race and the misconceptions out there, it is important that I correct some of them.  Please read this as your “chill out” diary.

As of this moment the official count shows Merkley trailing by about 8k votes with 1/3rd of the vote still out (Results at http://www.oregonlive.com/special/index.ssf/2008/11/senate.html).  However, most of the remaining votes are in deep blue counties like Multnomah, Lane and Benton.

To get into detail, these are the numbers we are looking at:

Multnomah County (Merkley winning 66-30) has only 47% in at this time.

Lane County (Merkley winning 58-38) has only 46% in at this time.

Benton County (Merkley winning 60-37) has only 74% in at this time.

By contrast, the largest Smith counties with votes still out are Jackson and Marion and there are both less votes there and the margins aren’t as big.  Merkley won BOTH Washington and Clackamas Counties but was offset a bit by huge margins for Smith in eastern OR (Smith won 3-1 in most of those counties where Obama did 10-15% better).

Oh and making me more sure of this result than anything else is that Tim Hibbits, Or’s preeminent political analyst, called the race for Jeff last night (http://www.kptv.com/index.html)

As to why this is taking so long, a few reasons:

1. It always does.  Vote by mail ballots take longer to process because they have to be verified AND counted at the county office, rather than merely counted.

2. Last minute turnout was huge.   It was 2-2.5 times what it was in 2004 and given that the first priority of elections officials is to verify ballot, counting had to wait.  That’s how we know that about 180k votes are still to be counted in Multnomah County.

3. The precinct calculation is BS.  Since we don’t have polling places, ballots are counted as they come in (although not before election day), NOT by precinct.  That is why the Oregonian shows votes still out there when no one else.  

So sit tight, calm down and know when all the votes are counted Jeff will be victorious.  Thanks to everyone for all your hard work in electing Jeff the next Senator from Oregon.