The Concession

OK, I concede that my prediction of a Bush win was wrong. I'll need some good recipies for crow, but I'm delighted to eat it.

Now, regarding that other concession:

By my calculations if there are as many as 300,000 provisional and absentee ballots outstanding in Ohio Kerry would have to get at least 73% to win. If there are fewer, the necessary percentage goes up. Absentees tend to break Republican, if anything, and the provisionals are probably last minute registrants whose names didn't make it onto the rolls. Ohio has had provisional balloting for over a decade, so there's a history. But typically they're not counted, so we don't really know how they'd break. Except that the late registrants who did make it onto the rolls were about 50% Republican. (Lots of the new registrants signed up in order to vote for the Marriage initiative, and for Bush, apparently.)

With that, and the fact that Bush won the national popular vote by 4 million, I think Kerry will issue some sort of provisional concession later today. If he doesn't, he'll be seen as a sore loser. He may, however, after acknowledging how unlikely it is that the uncounted ballots would make a difference, insist that they be counted. Doing that would keep him true to his campaign promise.

As an interesting side note yesterday around the dinner hour Canadian (CBC) News stuck their neck out and projected that the marriage initiative in all but one of the states where it was on the ballot would be defeated. The exception, they contended, was Oregon. At this point the Marriage initiative passed in all states by wide margins. CBC biased?

(Cross-posted by Demosophist to Demosophia and The Jawa Report)