Posted on 11/12/2004 5:07:04 PM PST by CedarDave
SANTA FE, N.M. (Reuters) - Democratic challenger Sen. John Kerry has conceded, President Bush has laid out his plans for a second term and New Mexico still does not know who won the election in the sparsely populated state.
New Mexico is the only state that does not have a clear-cut winner in the presidential vote, and state officials were red-faced over the slow count. The state had vowed to speed up counting ballots after it took about a month to tally the vote in the 2000 presidential race, where Democrat Al Gore beat Bush by 366 votes.
Bush has about 373,000 votes to 365,000 for Kerry with most of the ballots counted, and several media outlets have projected Bush winning New Mexico's five electoral votes.
On Friday, all of New Mexico's counties had to complete a count in their regions, but one rural county still had problems and did not meet the deadline. The secretary of state's office said Bush's lead over Kerry has narrowed to about 6,800 votes, according to initial tallies of the provisional ballots submitted to the office on Friday.
The main problems this time were the narrow margin between Bush and Kerry, troubles sorting through provisional ballots and not learning from the 2000 count, critics said.
It will still take more than 10 days to find out who took the last state up for grabs in the Nov. 2 election.
"I will not be declaring a winner until Nov. 23," said New Mexico Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron.
About 750,000 people voted in New Mexico, and Republicans said money that should have gone to getting the vote counted ended up in a marketing campaign aimed at getting out the vote in the state run by Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson.
"The counties were unprepared for the volume of voters because the money wasn't there," said New Mexico Republican Party Executive Director Greg Graves.
Copyright © 2003 Reuters Limited.
more bs from the left ... who cares.....
Bush will pull this one out.
Did they find another reservation of dead Indians?
Maybe they run out of fingers and toes
Referring to NM or nationwide???
The news yesterday was that the vote count was complete, and that Bush had won the state by 5,000 votes. So now the voting isn't complete, but Bush's lead has increased by 1,800 votes?
I suspect election officials in NM haven't finished destroying military absentee ballots yet.
Any relation to Gavin Newsome?
Can we jsut give NM back to Mexico?
With such a sparse population, it'll be difficult to find enough votes to steal to take the election away from Bush.....
Call SOROS!
WHAAAAA??? Details, please!
I'd rather we give San Francisco and LA back to Mexico, in exchange for them closing their border.
This is all BILL RICHARDSON'S FAULT!
'Rat translation: "With enough voting irregularities, we can change the outcome of the election."
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