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Will Obama pick up an extra electoral vote?

Looking through the election results, I found something rather interesting. There are two states--Maine and Nebraska--that award their electoral votes partly by congressional districts. In both states, the winner in each district gets one electoral vote, and the statewide winner picks up the extra two votes. Obama carried every district in Maine, so all that state's electoral votes will go to him. But what about Nebraska?

Nebraska has three congressional districts, giving it a total of five electoral votes. McCain easily won two of the districts, and won the state overall. But in the first district, which includes all of Douglas County (Omaha) and part of Sarpy County, things are much tighter. Fortunately, the Sarpy County website gives precinct-by-precinct returns for both President and Congress, so it is relatively easy to figure out how many votes Obama and McCain got in the portion of the county lying within the first district. The last I checked, Obama was actually ahead of McCain in the first district as a whole, by 134,168 votes to 132,908. These figures apparently don't include all the absentee votes, so they may well change. But there seems to be a good chance that Obama will pick up an extra electoral vote in Nebraska, of all places.

Doug Rees of CA @ Nov 10, 2008 22:13:31 PM