the deal with missouri

in finally found an article that helped me figure out why missouri hasn't been called yet. mccain is ahead with 100% percent of the precincts reporting. it's been like that for the last 48 hours. what are they waiting for if all the votes are in?

this morning i searched around and found this article from last wednesday:

With all Missouri precincts reporting results, Republican John McCain has 1,442,613 votes (49.4 percent). Democrat Barack Obama has 1,436,745 (49.2 percent). Four other candidates split the remaining 38,263 votes (1.3 percent).

The secretary of state’s office said about 7,000 provisional ballots were cast around the state. They won’t be counted until election authorities (county clerks, in most cases) determine whether the voters were eligible to cast ballots.

so now it makes sense. 1,442,613 minus 1,436,745 is 5,868. obama is behind, but the number of provisional ballots that haven't been counted exceed the margin that mccain is ahead. the provisionals have to be individually adjudicated (to see if each one should count) before they can be opened and added to the tally.

while the number of provisional ballots gives obama a theoretical possibility to win missouri, he would have to get the vast majority (more than 83%) of those votes to win. meanwhile, it looks like missouri officials have already worked their way through some of the provisional ballots. look at the CNN page again. as of this writing, mccain's total has increased to 1,442,673 (an increase of 60 votes from the block-quoted article) and obama's has increased to 1,436,814 (an increase of 69 votes). in the past two days they've counted 129 additional votes and that resulted in only a 9 vote gain by obama. he's getting only 53.4% of the provisional votes (and that's assuming that none were deemed to be invalid), far short of the pick-up rate he needs. (note: by the time you read this, the mccain and obama tallies might change a bit more)

in addition to the 129 provisions that have been counted and added to the tally on the CNN page, there must have been some that were thrown out. during my poll watcher training, the obama campaign estimated that only 1/2 of all provisionals would be counted. assuming that rate applies, that would mean that about 250 provisions have been reviewed so far, leaving about 6,750 still outstanding. to win MO, obama would have to close a 5,859 gap. at this point he would need to get about 86.8% of the remaining provisional ballots both to be counted as eligible ballots and to be an obama vote. i can't see that happening. missouri may not be officially called yet, but it is effectively a red state.