Well done, Senator-elect Merkley. Awesome.

HA! Wishful thinking... I fixed the typo. Don't want to deny Gordon 100,000 of his supporters!

Six o'clock numbers have started coming in - Lane County just put Merkley up by 2,235. Awaiting the other 6:00 numbers.

Whew! Thank you, Barack Obama! Tails were just long enough. Thank you, Gordon Smith! You were just sleazy enough. Thank you, Jeff Merkley! You were just viable enough.

Multnomah's newest numbers put Jeff up by 4,068

Can I go get something done now? This whole day has been exhausting, and I only have a senate race to show for it. Oh wait - A SENATE RACE! Wow! Congratulations, Senator Merkley!!!

Kaboom!

Congratulations to everyone who helped Senator-elect Jeff Merkley throughout the race, and to Sarah Lane, Carla Axtman in particular for the netroots work you both did throughout the primary and general. Hat tip to Kari for his services to the campaign as well, and of course to all in the netroots who helped in the begining and to all those who fought the good fight for Novick and then helped the team after the primaries.

This is a major achievement, to unseat such a well-healed incumbent and smooth political operator like Smith. Savor this, celebrate, then get to hard work helping to keep our entire Democratic caucuses both in Salem and in D.C. honest and working for all Oregonians and for our country.

Not a problem. I've been pretty focused on this race ever since I got home from work earlier today.

Marion County's next set of numbers should be out any minute now and Lane, Multnomah, Clackamas, etc. usually put out results on the hour.

Gordon Smith did very little for Oregon, and his "influence" on Ways and Means did nothing for us. He couldn't even work to bring county payments back to parts of Oregon that desperately needed them.

He was a Senator who couldn't even be bothered to meet with constituents, hold public events, etc. unless there was a big check involved. Heck, Senator Wyden took a few moments out of his busy schedule to talk to my six year-old, and he's not even up for re-election.

We'll now have a second senator who will vote for Oregon (Smith regularly canceled out Wyden's vote - that's hardly working with Wyden for Oregon), will be open and available to constituents, and will fight for everyday Oregonians.

Obviously the majority of the voters felt that Smith didn't represent them, otherwise they would have re-elected him.

It's time to celebrate. I've been holding off but now it's time to celebrate. Gordon Smith packs his bags and return to Pendleton. And now we get to raise our glasses high - to everyone who spent a minute or an hour - blogging, calling people, canvassing, donating money, putting up a lawn sign, putting on a bumper sticker, wearing a button, registering someone to vote - that was all powerful ful work and we get to celebrate that our candidate has won. Take a moment and enjoy this.

A quick look around the web shows that a ES&S Model 650 Central Ballot Counter is about $72,000, and does 300 ballots a minute.

Back when I used to help my parents with their businesses (my mom owned a ceramic shop, my dad a cement contractor business), I would have been responsible for the creation of around half a dozen jobs.

Back when I wrote for newspapers and had their subscriptions way up, probably another dozen people in advertising, plus an extra reporter.

Since then, I've mostly been a stay-at-home mom, so I wasn't in the business of creating jobs. But now I'm in the process of starting up my own business and based on the amount of interest I've had from small businesses and non-profits, I can see me having at least a handful of employees over the next 1-2 years.

Who knows how many I've created indirectly by buying locally, supporting local small businesses, etc.

But there's more to being a productive member of society than just creating jobs.

All I was doing was giving the price of a high volume ballot counting machine. I never said we had to buy one, I was simply answering a question.

Maybe before jumping down people's throats you should take a deep breath and take a better look at the conversation.

Have I ever signed a paycheck in my life? Yes, I have.

And just because it isn't your name on the paycheck, doesn't mean you didn't create the job. It just means you don't sign the check.

A lot of the Republicans I saw talking about why they were against it were voting no because they wanted to do more to bail out big companies, tax breaks, etc. They didn't vote no because they were against the idea, but because they wanted to do more.

But anyway, that's off topic for this item.

Dave Lister - WTF? Go back and look at the stats: job creation has almost without exception been higher under Democratic than Republican administrations.

According to SOS numbers right now, 49,758 voted in the presidential race and not the U.S. Senate race. That number will go up as the counties finalize their numbers.

But we can't really get into all the details necessary on this to see how many undervoted and such until the abstracts come out in a few weeks. Then we can really take a look at the numbers.

Not only that, it's surprising how many Republicans voted for Obama, but still wanted Smith as their U.S. Senator. Plus some Democrats are Smith supporters.

Re: Merkley failed to carry at least 50,000 Obama voters. It seems pretty obvious that Obama picked up a pretty hefty amount of Republican votes.
& Smith was pretty obviously trying for Democratic votes... so exactly who failed? .... & whatever!

in other news... AWESOME! & congratulations...& 83% voter turnout in Multnomah Co!!! I've been bragging on us all over the planet (via internet tubes, "chat rooms" and such)

happy dance

I disagree. I don't think that M61 would have failed had M57 not been on the ballot. However, that's off topic for this post, so that's all I'll say for now.

Brownlow had a lot to do with it, clearly. But that doesn't change the fact that Merkley is going to Washington, where I have no doubt he'll shine. Gordon Smith was a reliable vote for the GOP, but he was an absentee senator--a fact even Republicans would have to admit. Jeff's passion for legislation and his knowledge of issues will translate into real work. I LOVE the idea of his partnering with Ron Wyden as a champion for health care. Do you think Smith was going to do that?

Let me say that again: partner with Ron Wyden. Nice ring to it, isn't there?

David Lister,

Of course government creates wealth, or that is to say, its workers do. They produce goods and services.

The fact that most often they are paid for with taxes doesn't mean the wealth isn't being created. By that reasoning, you or your employees aren't really creating wealth, because your customers (someone else) are paying for it.

When I lived in Cambridge Mass. my electric utility company was municipally owned. It produced electricity and sold it to me. It worked exactly the same way as my relationship with PGE here in Portland. (That by the way is a real socialist relationship, unlike the current dishonest rightwing attempts to define liberalism as socialism).

It's true that in a market economy in which government is expected to provide certain kinds of goods and services on a basis that isn't rationed by price (schools, fire & police services, most public roads and bridges, courts of law more or less, traffic regulating devices, regulatory services maintaining standards of various sorts etc.) government couldn't get a lot of its income without taxes on private economic activity.

It's just as true that private businesses could not operate without the goods and services provided by government. Or not in a capitalist way, anyway. You'd end up with something between feudalism and organized crime. The goods and services produced by government are part of the general social wealth -- that's why classical political economic writings often call the polity = civil social unit = civil society which in the proper classical sense includes government a "commonwealth."

According to you, if the government gets income, by taxes, or by bonds that are to be repaid by taxes, or, apparently, even by bonds to be repaid from sales of some sort(?) and organizes the production of something, pay wages and salaries and hiring contractors etc. in the process, whatever it makes isn't considered wealth. Say it's a school building.

Now, in the town I grew up in, they built a lot of schools in the 1950s and 1960s due to the baby boom. And then in the 1980s, they had a baby bust. So they sold a bunch of schools to private nursing home & assisted living facility entrepreneurs. McMenamin's Kennedy School facilities are a variant on the same thing.

As nearly as I can figure out about what your claim seems to be, when the town government owned those buildings to provide educational services (formation of human capital if you like, though I'd prefer to look at it in other ways) they weren't wealth. But when they sold them to private owners who used them to make money, suddenly they must have become wealth.

I say that's nonsense -- the buildings were wealth when the government invested capital in building them, investment that contributed to other forms of creation of wealth through the letting of contracts & so forth (just as later teacher salaries and custodian wages when spent or saved or invested were wealth and contributed to other creations of wealth), and they remained wealth when they were sold.

It's just as idiotic to say that when the government hires people it doesn't create jobs. Or that government managers don't write paychecks or face hiring and firing decisions etc.

And of course there's the mystification of "creating jobs" anyway -- it's only half the equation or cycle, your employees' productivity creates your profits too. They may lack settings for exercising their productivity without you (though I can tell you from living in Africa in places with formal unemployment ranging from 40%-60% that people produce and trade stuff informally and make their own jobs, albeit not with very good income results) but employers couldn't sell whatever they sell without workers either.

Your comments about needing to negotiate the terms of the different parts of these relationships make more sense, but as in any negotiation there is more than one party to it.

On one other note, I'm sorry, but President Bush and Hank Paulson are your party, not ours. The bailout is a joint venture, and if the president had been a Democrat, it would have looked rather different. I agree that Democrats bear responsibility for it (though Oregon's mostly voted agin' it) but you can't honestly deny that Republicans do too.

As we're getting later, OregonLive is getting further behind in updating their numbers. So I've just been keeping a tab open for the counties still updating numbers tonight and getting the data from them myself.

Right now, my numbers have Merkley up 5,737, including a Jackson County update that OL is missing.

Dave, my sympathies are with you. I've spent more elections crying in my beer than crying with joy, and it always sucks.

But elections are about priorities. Your priority is clearly a pro-business orientation. You didn't say it outright, but your suggestion is that encouraging business should be government's responsibility. That has been priorities 1-10 in Washington since 1980. But the voters apparently don't agree that it should be the priority in 2009.

I hope Obama and the Democrats take a page from the Merkley playbook and find some of the common ground they share with Republicans. There's a lot to get done that we all agree needs to get done. You might not prioritize it at the top of the list, but elections are about selecting leaders. Jeff's going to join 99 other leaders and hammer out a vision for the future. I hope you find it worthwhile, if not paramount.

As for me, I look forward to seeing some of MY priorities moving up the list a bit.

Jake - are you serious? $100k for 10 voting machines??? If you can get them for less than $600,000 I'd be amazed. Then you better also have the funds to staff the rest of the operation (at some point you need more signature checkers, etc...)

Ted: I agree. The numbers I saw put the heavy duty machines at about $70-75,000 each, and I'm sure it varies depending on if you buy one or several. They just look nice since they can do 300 ballots a minute.

But I also know there are a lot of other important things we need to spend our money on that affect us every day, like crime, health and mental health care, our roads and bridges, economic development, and more.

The estimate Kari gave is the upper range of the margin of victory, since Republican voters tended to vote later in this election, and will be overrepresented in the votes yet to be counted. It won't be enough to help Smith win, but the result should be closer than the projected 880k to 825k.

Just sayin'

Laura:

Based on the numbers from the SOS office thus far, it appears about 50,000 less people voted in the U.S. Senate race than did the Presidential race.

We'll have better numbers when the elections are certified and abstracts come out showing how many votes for each candidate, write-ins, overvotes, and undervotes.

My most up-to-date numbers show Merkley up 6,076 now.

In sum, my estimate right now is that Merkley will get roughly 880,000 votes, Smith will get roughly 825,000 votes. That's a win of 49% to 46%. Dave Brownlow will finish with roughly 86,000 votes, or 5%.

Hot diggity! That is exceptionally close to my projection for Mapes' WWB contest. I had it 48.75% to 46.00% with Brownlow getting 5.25%

I've tried adding Measure 64 to my spreadsheet. The problem is that a number of counties don't have their information online - and Oregon Live, KGW, and KATU don't break them out by county.

I need:

Douglas, Gilliam, Harney, Lake, Linn, Malheur, Sherman, Wallowa, and Wheeler.

Thanks, Peter. That's done.

Tony --

Lane County reports 148,929 ballots. Here's how the Senate race breaks down:

83,547 Merkley 54,219 Smith 5,790 Brownlow 340 Write-in 0 Overvotes 5,033 Undervotes

Those numbers add up to 149,929. They're done.

At least, pending any ballots that accidentally wound up in other counties. Yeah - your ballot has to be delivered to ANY county elections office by 8 p.m. election day. We usually get a small update on Thursday or Friday as a few dozen ballots delivered to the wrong office get delivered to the right places.

Maybe, Tony. My understanding is that the "ballots cast" number is the total that are in -- even before they've been tallied.

We'll find out soon enough.

Truth is a defense to Godwin.

Hannity is not so much like Goebbels as he is a student and follower, a practitioner of G's advocated tactic of the Big Lie.

Huge overnight update from Multnomah County now in. Merkley now leads by 37,657 votes.

Kari,

I believe Tony is right. If you look at the comparable figure on the Multnomah County website it has been changing, and MC has been providing a separate figure, "ballots received" (ca. 390,000) since the polls closed. Most other counties don't do that.

The reporting system appears not to have been updated to account for vote-by-mail, cf. "precincts reporting."

Well much of the country might have heard by now of his fine set of golf-clubs he can now make use of. So I will shed no tears for the hardships of his retirement, what with the prospects of golfing with $1 million golf clubs and no longer canceling out Oregon's voice in the United States Senate.

Oh, and Dave Lister, more than a few liberals and progressives around here are business owners who understand fully what the legal obligations of meeting payroll are about. So please stop arrogating for yourself that you have unique understanding of business, or the needs and issues facing business owners large or small.

We could embarrass Dave L forever about his ignorant talking points on taxes, but if he's focused on job creation, it should be pointed out that a quick historical check shows that Democratic administrations tend to create more jobs than Republican ones. Or if it's wealth you're interested in Dave, surely you know that the stock market does notably better with a D in the White House than an R.

Or maybe not. Enjoy that beer, tears and all!

Right, counties have been inputting the number of ballots counted into the ballots cast area. As such, with every update those numbers have been increasing.

I'd like to see SOS Brown set forth some rules and guidelines regarding how results are reported so that these things aren't so confusing for people. They're still using report styles that worked back before voting by mail.