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New Mexico Democrats' vote count totals don't add up
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The state Democratic Party's presidential caucus vote count has suffered another setback.
Party officials said Wednesday they must recheck the results of their final canvass after seeing the numbers didn't add up.
The party on Tuesday had announced what it called the "final totals" from the Super Tuesday vote — the tally of absentee and regular ballots — and posted a news release and link to them on its Web site. It removed those items after finding the statewide totals didn't match the county-by-county totals, officials said.
"If I'm uncomfortable that what I have up there is not a hundred percent accurate, I'll pull it down until I can get to that point," state Democratic Party Chairman Brian Colón said.
Democratic officials said they would recheck the final canvass numbers of regular and absentee ballots and post the correct tallies on the party's Web site. As of early this morning, the results were not yet available.
By Wednesday, the party had started counting more than 8,000 qualified provisional ballots to determine whether Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama claims victory in New Mexico.
Clinton holds the lead by more than 1,000 votes. More than 157,000 votes were cast statewide.
Kim Brace, who has focused on election administration issues for more than 30 years and is president of the Washington, D.C., company Election Data Services, questioned the state Democratic Party's ability to come up with legitimate results.
"The party itself has got egg on its face in trying to lay out a process in terms that people's voices can be heard," he said. "I don't know if you could trust whatever the election results are that they're coming up with."
Part of the problem, Brace said, is that the party is running the election, but is not bound by state electoral laws.
"It's an attempt to make it look like an election, call it a caucus, but not follow any of the rules that you have for an election," he said. "That's not the way normal elections are run."
The party has until Friday to finish the count, and Colón said he was optimistic about meeting or even beating the deadline.
About a dozen party and campaign officials were engrossed in counting the provisional ballots at an Albuquerque accounting firm Wednesday. More than 9,000 provisional ballots cast will not be counted unless they are challenged by representatives of the campaigns, Colón said.
The provisional ballots — their images scanned into a computer system — were projected onto a wall in the darkened room for those involved in the count to see. They include representatives from the Clinton and Obama campaigns, auditors, a caucus judge and employees of TrueBallot, the company the Democrats hired to provide election software.
The provisional ballots are identified and bundled in batches so the actual ballot can be reviewed, if necessary, said Nick Koumoutseas of TrueBallot.
The computer software highlights the voter's choice in green or, if the voter marks more than one candidate, it highlights the dual or triple answers in red.
However, the observers can see the ballot image on the screen and override the computer's choice should they discern a different voter intent, he said.
Koumoutseas showed several instances of overvoting, in which voters had marked more than one name per ballot. Such ballots will not be counted. In one case, a voter had marked three choices, including Clinton, and then written "Hillary Clinton" in sprawling letters in the write-in space.
A total of 157,354 ballots — absentee, regular or provisional — were cast in New Mexico on Super Tuesday. That's a 54 percent increase from the party's first presidential caucus four years ago.

