Math is hard.
While we sit back and watch the Republican Party debate amongst themselves as to which past century was the mostest awesome and worth returning to, we also ought to keep an eye on their continuing tragicomic efforts at math. Maine's GOP announced last Saturday that Mitt Romney had won their state's GOP caucuses, which was an impressive feat considering that some of those caucuses have not yet taken place. Even more impressive was the way they stuck to their guns on that point—at least,
until now:
The Maine Republican Party has reversed course and will recommend that delayed caucus results from Washington County be included in its final presidential poll tally.
How novel! They might count caucuses that happened after their premature declaration of victory! There is also good news and bad news for some smaller towns that
did have their votes sooner, but whose results were not counted. The good news is that the Republicans now admit that some of those vote tallies were not received because, among other excuses, they "went to spam" when being emailed to the party (and, apparently, the party never said "gosh, we haven't received mail from the caucus at such-and-such, perhaps we should look into that"). The bad news is that the party isn't particularly concerned with the errors, even while admitting they
technically changed who won particular town caucuses. Meh, it's just math.
Washington County has its own caucuses tomorrow; those were the ones previously delayed by an expected storm, thus confusing Maine Republicans to no end because they are not used to it snowing in Maine. The current debate is whether the party should release corrected results before those caucuses take place of afterwards, so they're asking the Romney and Paul campaigns what they should do.
So good news! Republicans may, eventually, perhaps in a few days or a week or a month or so, know the Maine vote totals. Provided it does not snow, of course, and provided that they have worked out the issues with their spam filters. On that last point I can't judge them too harshly; most of the email I get about Mitt Romney or Ron Paul turns out to be spam, too.
