I absolutely HATE Blogger. I’m thinking of moving. It drives me crazy when i sit down and write a really long blog entry (about the election, of course) and then when I click on publish, it completely erases the entire entry. argh!

Since I don’t have the time or the energy to retype the entire thing….I will add a shortened version of my rant about provisional ballots in Ohio.

For those of you who don’t know, there are three states that are still up in the air. New Mexico and Iowa and Ohio. Because these three states have yet to declare a winner, neither Bush nor Kerry has the necessary 270 electoral votes to win the election.

In Ohio, where dub-ya is winning by more than 136,000 votes, he can’t be declared the winner because of some 250,000 uncounted provisional ballots.

What? Provisional who?

Provisional ballots are punch cards given to voters in Ohio who show up at the correct polling place and are not listed on the voters’ list because they have moved or due to clerical errors. The votes are set aside in sealed envelopes to be counted along with absentee ballots.

“The vote count in Ohio has not been completed,” said Mary Beth Cahill, Mr. Kerry’s campaign manager. “There are more than 250,000 remaining votes to be counted. We believe when they are, John Kerry will win Ohio.”

White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, though, has said that Bush has won this election. He already has won the popular vote by more than 3.7 million votes, and he has said that Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell told him that the President’s vote margin was a “statistically insurmountable lead, even after provisional ballots are considered.”

While I’m unhappy of a George W. Bush victory, since I voted for John Kerry, I am willing to admit that he has won. Just let him claim his victory so we can move on from this. Who the heck wants a repeat of 2000’s chad debacle? Who wants to sit around for weeks while extra ballots are counted and recounted? Put us all out of our misery already…