Last Reported: Nov 5 2009 12:24PM EST

William T. “Bill” Bolling 582 59.08%

Jody M. Wagner 402 40.81%

Write In 1 0.10%

Enough said.

Not good to have major errors like this persist for so long, if they’ve been addressed. Getting these fixed and the results updated quickly is important to maintaining voter confidence in the results.

By the way, as a result of the count, Anderson’s margin increased by at least 71 votes. The report last night was “229,” but the written report from the voting machines was “299,” probably resulting from a transcription error. I strongly suspect that the same explains the discrepancy in Pattie. There probably aren’t 4,022 registered voters in that precinct, and almost certainly not that many voters yesterday.

“SBE” does not post election results. All results are posted by local election officials — Electoral Boards and General Registrars — to the SBE web site. The SBE has no source of information about election returns other than the local officials.

The canvass begins on election night and continues on Wednesday morning. Most jurisdictions are able to finish the process within a day, but sometimes it takes longer. We were able to finish the canvass in Charlottesville today in about 6 hours, but last year — 2008 — we took over two days to complete the canvass. And Charlottesville only has 9 precincts, including Central Absentee Precinct. Imagine how much time and effort has to go into the canvass for large-population localities like Prince William, Fairfax, or Virginia Beach.

The canvass process is meticulous and tedious. It involves going through the paperwork of each precinct, one at a time, checking numbers and assuring that all votes have been counted.

EVERY ELECTION results in some mistakes being reported on election night. The errors might be small or they might be large. THIS IS WHY THE RESULTS ARE CALLED “UNOFFICIAL.” Nothing is “official” until the State Board of Elections certifies the winners about three weeks after the election.

Statements of Results are compiled by election officials after 7:00 p.m. on a day that they have been working since 5:00 a.m. or earlier. Bad penmanship, a “4″ read as a “9″, failing to transfer numbers from one piece of paper to another, writing “402″ as “4402,” misunderstanding “nine” as “five” over a telephone in a noisy room — any of these may cause inaccurate reports on election night that might not be corrected for hours or days. None of these errors are excusable if they are allowed to stand, but that is why we have a canvass: to correct errors and assure accuracy.

Electoral Boards and their staffs try to complete the canvass as efficiently and swiftly as possible, but it cannot be instantaneous.

The canvass is an open, public meeting. Any citizen can observe it. Try it next time and you might not be so ignorantly critical. The Democratic and Republican party officials who have observed Charlottesville canvasses always leave with a sense of enlightenment (”I never knew how much you had to do after election day”) and appreciation. I suspect the same is true in other localities.

He’s not the only candidate who would probably act like that.

In this case, SBE made what looks like a 3,820 vote error in one precinct, and still hasn’t noticed it. If that kind of huge mistake eludes them, will these errors continue to not be noticed, and what about the errors that aren’t quite so glaring? Do they ever get corrected in the official results?

And what do we say to candidates who are given bad information about election returns and then make decisions on that bad information that they have to then go back and reverse?

It’s not that hard to prevent obvious mistakes, and SBE owes it to the candidates and the public to take reasonable steps to prevent them.

As they have proven, they are anything but sophisticated, but they make up for that with gall.

Don’t look for the SBE to do squat. They will figure that the R’s won - so why bother. I am sure that they are none to happy with the results as they are. Remember, these are the folks who brought us motor voter.

Next election, it will be worse and more widespread.

Count on it.