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Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Let loose the lawyers!

New Mexico Caucus update - 020608

The full scope of this mess came into view today.

My guess is that by tomorrow night we will have a full tilt National disaster on our hands.
Besides all the voters that walked away without voting and other assorted problems consider one number - there are over 16,000 provisional ballots to be counted. Lets break this down - a volunteer organization has to open up and decide if 16,000 ballots are valid then count them.

If this process takes on average 10 minutes per ballots the numbers are as follows:

16,000 ballots/6 ballots per hour = 2,6667 "man hours"/8 hours per day = 333.3 days of effort = 66.7 weeks = 1.28 years

If we have robots running at obscene rates and on average do a ballot a minute:

16,000 ballots/60 ballots per hour = 266.7 "man hours"/8 hours per day = 33.3 days of effort = 6.7 weeks

So good luck getting them counted!

This is the danger of provisional ballots run-a-muck. They each take at least 100x as much time to deal with as a regular ballot and handing 'em out like candy is insane.

I think New Mexico just learned a lesson the rest of the US needs to pay close attention to -

Colon is toast!

Just found this AP story at KVIA's web site:
Associated Press - February 6, 2008 9:05 PM ET

ALBUQUERQUE (AP) - Governor Richardson says he's frustrated with state Democratic Party Chairman Brian Colon after reports of long lines and other problems at polling sites in the state party's presidential caucus.

It was Richardson who in 2003 originally conceived of holding an early caucus in New Mexico, and the state's first one was in 2004.

Today, the governor raised the possibility that state Democrats should rethink whether to keep the early nominating contest four years from now.

Richardson said he was deeply disturbed by reports of long lines at polling places and other problems. Some polling sites ran out of ballots and had to rush to make copies.

He says he expressed his frustration to Colon.

Colon says he hasn't met with nor talked to Richardson.

Earlier today, Colon took full responsibility for problems and apologized for miscalculating.
Well good questions can be asked where was Big Bill when $'s were being raised for the Caucus. No doubt he was off running for President.

Well the World ain't fair and if Brian Colon didn't know it before he's learning it now -

Friday, February 01, 2008

Obama's visit to Albuquerque

Just got back from the mob scene at the Convention Center and the line literally went around the building. Once they filled up the Kiva and an overflow room in the Convention Center they got folks to congregate at the Civic Plaza across the street where he spoke to the crowd and visited for a few minutes.

Here's a few photo's I took -

      Barack has problems with a bad microphone

      Barack working the crowd




MoveOn endoses Obama

MoveOn, for the first time in history, is endorsing a Presidential Candidate - Barack Obama.

The votes:
    Obama: 197,444 70.4%
    Clinton: 83,084 29.6%

That pretty much says it all from the progressive camp - MoveOn members prefer Barack over Hillary by a factor of better than 2 to 1.