By Chris Wamalwa in USA
Kenyans living in the US rallied their troops in a last-minute effort to propel President Barack Obama forward as he crosses the finish line.
Through social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and text messages, Kenyans across the US reached to their fellow Kenyans urging them to come out over the weekend and support Obama.
“We plan to knock on doors the whole night today, tomorrow and even the day after. It is going to be a long weekend and we are ready for this,” John Amunga of South Side Chicago told The Standard on telephone.
In Des Moines, Iowa, one of the battleground states, Nancy Mwirotsi, an ardent supporter of Obama also agreed that for majority of Kenyans who still support Obama, there wouldn’t be much sleep until the voting tomorrow.
Last weekend was critical to both campaigns because the race is too close to call. The presidential race is expected to be extremely close, and that has a lot of people nervous about what it will mean for election night.
By Friday, many commentators in the US Press were expressing the fear that the vote count could drag on for days, or even weeks, as it did in 2000. It is understood that lawyers for the campaigns, the political parties and State election offices have started preparing for that possibility.
Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted could very well be the man in the middle of any election night storm. By all accounts, the vote in his crucial battleground State will be extremely close.
“We are preparing for the potential that it would be so close, that we might not know what the results will be on election night,” Husted told the Press Friday.
According to Husted, one possibility is that an automatic recount will be triggered. Ohio law requires a recount if the vote margin between the candidates is a quarter of a per cent or less of the total vote or about a 150,000-vote difference.
Directives
“We are issuing directives and working with local elections boards to make sure that the rules are in place for how they’re going to handle the security of the ballots, that everyone is well aware in advance of what the rules are for a recount process,” said Husted.
Husted knows that if there is a recount, lawyers will be descending en masse on the Buckeye State. These will include lawyers for President Obama and Mitt Romney — and anyone else with an interest in the outcome.
But a recount is just one of several things that could delay the final count. Husted told Pam Hessler of NPR that in Ohio, about 200,000 voters are expected to cast provisional ballots because they either don’t have identification, because they requested an absentee ballot but showed up at the polls instead, or for other reasons.
But those ballots can’t even be counted until ten days after Election Day, according to Ohio law.
Ned Foley, an election law expert at Ohio State University says then there’s the State’s announcement of the official count, or canvass. “The statute says that localities have up to ten days to do that. So that’s a second ten days. That could take you to November 27,” said Foley.
And he says any recount that might be triggered can’t even begin until the canvass is completed, meaning the tally for Ohio could easily go into December. And the Electoral College needs to meet on December 17 to officially pick the president.
Foley said the deadlines could change if there are legal challenges and the courts get involved. Larry Norden with the Brennan Centre for Justice in New York notes that automatic recounts can be triggered by close votes in states other than Ohio, such as Florida, Colorado and Pennsylvania.
He added: “The big fights are always over ballots that have not yet been counted, so another issue is absentee ballots.”
Norden, author of a new report detailing just how different and complicated the recount rules are in the crucial battleground states, noted that absentee ballots are increasingly popular around the country, and that they’re unpredictable.
“In states like Florida, North Carolina and Ohio in 2008, we saw many thousands of rejected absentee ballots. So, that is likely to be a subject of dispute in a very close election,” he said.
For example, an absentee ballot can be rejected if a voter accidentally signs it in the wrong place or if officials decide the signature doesn’t match the one they have on record. Norden says similar issues can be raised with military and overseas ballots that could also arrive and be counted days after November 6.
“It’s an election administrator’s prayer that we don’t have close elections,” he said. The presidential campaigns also hope for a clear outcome, but they’re preparing for the worst.
A Romney campaign aide said they have all the resources they need for any potential dispute or recount. The Obama campaign also has teams of lawyers ready to go.
But publicly, they’re putting on a more optimistic front. Both campaigns say that they expect to win decisively on November 6.
— With contributions from Pam Hessler-NPR
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