Ten old-fashioned state elections offices still have a policy of not reporting unofficial election returns on their web pages. These states are: Alabama, Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New York, and Wisconsin. If you live in one of those ten states, consider asking your state elections office to revise its policy. If 40 states and the District of Columbia can report unofficial election returns, there is no sound reason why all states cannot do this.
Elections in those ten states are under the control of the Secretary of State, except that in Illinois, New York and Wisconsin, the State Board of Elections is in charge.
Mississippi is probably going to post photocopies of the pencil-written tally sheets again.
Ok, they did post actual computer documents last time. But they’re seriously behind the times.
Also, Arizona has unofficial returns.
Thanks for the correction on Arizona. I’ve fixed the blog entry.
It’s not so much that Illinois refuses to post unofficial results as that the election system here is designed so that the State Board of Elections doesn’t have results until certification. You have to hunt down unofficial results from the 110 local election units to get totals. The largest election authorities have their unofficial results online; the small counties don’t.
Iowa canvasses completed yesterday and Sec of State plans to post today.
http://sos.state.ia.us/
What does “unofficial results” mean exactly?
“Unofficial results” generally means preliminary, that is the results available before the election officials have reviewed the tallies for errors and completeness, heard any challenges or request for recounts, and signed off on the results making them “official”. It usually takes several weeks, or more, for official results to be released.
I suggest folk request results from these states, using foia if necessary, until they decide it is easier to just post them.
Suffolk County, NY posts unofficial returns. There may be others.
Thank God that there ARE these old-fashioned states that don’t bow down to the god of technology. There’s a reason that official returns are official returns.
Why should we continue to turn over control of our elections to the Associated Press? Do we really want journalists running our elections with their unofficial returns? Why not just abolish all elections, judges, and juries and turn over those functions to the “unofficial” realm of the Associated Press or whatever media organization wants to pick them up? We could save TRILLIONS of dollars every year!
The New York State election board does provide links to each counties (general) web sites. You simply have to click on each of those, and then figure out where each county has stuck their election results.