Has My Vote Been Counted?

Georgia went for John McCain. No surprise there except for what I just read online at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

With nearly 90 percent of the state’s precincts reporting, McCain had a huge lead: 56 percent to 44 percent for Obama and less than 1 percent for Libertarian Party nominee Bob Barr, the former Georgia congressman. But those figures included fewer results from metro Atlanta and apparently none of the ballots cast in metro Atlanta during massive early and advance voting. [my emphasis] More than 600,000 ballots cast before Tuesday in Cobb, Fulton, DeKalb and Gwinnett were to be counted after the live Tuesday votes.

The rest of the article can be found at: "Georgia Voters Apparently Came Through for McCain," by Aaron Gould Sheinin, Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008, and updated Nov. 5) And, of course, the majority of those early voters were Obama supporters.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution editors asked their readers to reply to the question: What Does This Moment Mean to You? Many of the comments would be unbelievable if we hadn't heard this kind of poison before: the claims that Barack Obama is a Muslim, a socialist, a dictator, a terrorist, an anti-Christ, etc. And other comments which are quite racist. The majority of Georgia's voters went for McCain, all right, but evidently some of those voters weren't moved by McCain's gracious concession speech.

Update: Jim Galloway, in his Political Insider column, describes how the Atlanta metro-area votes affect the final results of the Chambliss/Martin race. As those votes are counted, Saxby Chambliss's lead over Democratic challenger Jim Martin "has been nearly cut in half," at 187,513 ballots, with Chambliss's early lead of 55% down to 51.2%. So Jim Martin came much closer in the race than earlier reports suggested.

New Update, 2:30 a.m. : Chambliss's lead has slipped again as those votes continue to be counted:

2:20 a.m.: Republican Saxby Chambliss now clings to a 50.4 percent lead in the U.S. Senate race, a cushion of only 144,410 votes. A handful of missing boxes in both Carroll and DeKalb counties may give us the answer of whether we have a Dec. 2 runoff. Democrat Jim Martin is at 46.2 percent. (from Jim Galloway's column Political Insider, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Wednesday, Nov.5, 2:27 p.m.)