Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Mark Herring Declares Victory - GOP Demand for Recount Likely





While the Virginia State Board of Elections has not yet updated its website, Mark Herring has declared victory in Virginia's attorney general contest, apparently having won despite the Virginia GOP's voter suppression efforts and Ken Cuccinelli's 11th hour change in how provisional ballots would be counted in Fairfax County.  Once official, Herring's victory will confirm a complete blow out across the board with all three of the Extremist candidates nominated by The Family Foundation and its Tea Party allies going down to total defeat.  The result is a good one for Virginia and those who value sanity and our constitutional form of government.  Here are excerpts from the Washington Post and the Virginian Pilot, beginning with the Post:


State Sen. Mark R. Herring padded his still-narrow lead over state Sen. Mark D. Obenshain on Tuesday night in the race for Virginia attorney general, giving the Democrat an apparent 163-vote advantage before the results of the contest are certified.

The Fairfax County Electoral Board finished reviewing provisional ballots – mostly cast by people who did not have ID or went to the wrong polling place – and added 160 votes to Herring’s (Loudoun) total and 103 votes to the Republican’s. Herring already led on the State Board of Elections Web site by 106 votes.

The additional 57-vote margin from Fairfax was expected to give Herring a statewide lead of 163 votes out of more than 2.2 million cast – barring any last-minute changes from other localities, which had until 11:59 pm Tuesday to submit their numbers to the state election board.

A recount appears all but certain after the statewide results are certified Nov. 25, and the Obenshain campaign made clear that it considers the race far from over.
 Here are highlights from the Virginian Pilot:

Democrat Mark Herring declared victory in the attorney general’s race Tuesday night after a canvass of Fairfax County provisional ballots left him with an unofficial 163-vote lead over Republican Mark Obenshain out of 2.2 million cast last week.

“Over the course of the past week, a thorough and extensive process has ensured that every vote has been tallied and accounted for,” said Herring, a Loudoun County state senator. “The margin was close, but it is clear that Virginians have chosen me to serve as the next attorney general.”

Late Tuesday, he [Obenshain] stopped short of calling for a recount allowed by law in a race as close as this one, saying only that further announcements would come “in the days ahead.”

Defeated candidates have 10 days from when a vote is certified – Nov. 25 this year – to request a court-supervised recount they pay for unless the vote difference is less than 0.5 percent of the total votes cast. The public pays the tab in that case. Herring was ahead of Obenshain by a one-hundredth of a percentage point as of midday Tuesday.

A Herring victory this year would give Democrats, who won the races for governor and lieutenant governor last week, a sweep of statewide offices. That hasn’t occurred since 1989.
We can expect lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth from the Christofascists and their political prostitutes in the Virginia GOP who simply cannot comprehend that the majority of Virginia voters do not want the poisonous agenda that The Family Foundation controlled Virginia GOP seek to inflict on all citizens.   Even an across the board loss will not jolt these people out of the alternate reality in which they live.

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