Friday, November 29, 2013

Recount Redux In Virginia

It's official:  Republican Mark Obenshain has officially filed for a recount in his 165-vote loss to Democrat Mark Herring for the Virginia Attorney General's race, and TPM's Dan Strauss has the details:

A three-judge panel is formed for overseeing the election process. The panel, made up of the chief judge of the Richmond Circuit Court, Bradley B. Cavedo, and two other judges appointed by the Supreme Court of Virginia will oversee the recount. Most of the rules for the recount are already established but the panel will handle setting some of the procedures for the recount as well as any complaints either the Obenshain campaign or Herring campaign has about how the recount is going. The panel will hold hearings roughly a week after the Obenshain campaign's recount petition has been filed to establish the specific dates and procedures for the recount.
The Obenshain campaign said in a conference call with reporters Wednesday morning that it expected the recount to happen sometime in mid-December and that it would likely take a day, possibly two, for all the ballots to be recounted.

This recount will be different from previous Virginia recounts in that all ballots counted through optical scan will be rescanned again. That's in contrast to the 2005 attorney general recount between Bob McDonnell (R) and Creigh Deeds (D). State law during that recount said that the three-judge panel had to re-tabulate scanned ballots by hand. In 2008, Deeds sponsored legislation changing the law so all scanned ballots went through optical scan machines again instead of a hand recount. All other types of ballots cast in the race, including provisional and absentee, will be hand counted again.

What I don't expect:  the idiotic Minnesota Al Franken/Norm Coleman 2008 recount that took well into 2009 before Franken was declared the winner.  Hopefully Herring will be declared the victor before Christmas.

We'll keep an eye on this one.

No comments:

Related Posts with Thumbnails