From Dorothy Korber’s article in the Sacramento Bee:
Super Tuesday seems long gone as the nation turns its hungry eyes to the next round of presidential primaries – but for nearly a million Californians, the votes they cast in the presidential primary are yet to be counted.
This mountain of absentee and provisional ballots – 960,000 of them by one estimate – equals the total number of Democratic votes cast in Virginia this week and far exceeds Maryland and the District of Columbia.
“In California, we’re sitting on almost a million votes still to be tallied – and meanwhile the pundits are going on and on about states that don’t have a million votes, total,” said Steve Weir, who keeps a running tally of “unprocessed ballots” in his role as president of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials.
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“It’s not over till all the votes are counted,” said Robert Stern, head of the nonpartisan Center for Governmental Studies based in Los Angeles. “To have a million votes not counted a week after the election is extraordinary, especially in an election when people wanted so much for their vote to count.”Stern has been keeping a sharp eye on the evolving situation in California. In the great hunt for Democratic Party delegates, he figures, all those uncounted California ballots probably will translate into a mere handful of the state’s 370 delegates that are pledged to primary results – seven at most, in districts that were close to begin with (none of them in the Sacramento region).
But, with Hillary Rodham Clinton (who garnered 2.3 million votes in California) and Barack Obama (with 1.9 million votes) still battling for their party’s nomination, every delegate is hard-fought. On Wednesday, the Associated Press calculated that Obama’s delegate total stands at 1,275 to Clinton’s 1,220.
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