Provisional Ballots

Mitt Romney's top campaign official in Florida conceded Thursday that President Obama will win the state, acknowledging a vote count that was moving inexorably against the Republicans. Several Florida counties are still counting ballots, but most of what remains are in areas of South Florida that Obama carried by significant margins. When all those ballots are tallied, they likely will add to the president's edge in the state, which was 55,832 votes as of Thursday afternoon, a lead of about 0.7%.

More than 300,000 ballots in Los Angeles County still remained to be counted Friday, 1 1/2 weeks after voters went to the polls. Election officials are scurrying to process roughly 220,000 provisional ballots and 84,000 mail-in ballots, according to Marcia Ventura, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County registrar. New vote tallies released Friday showed significant changes in one election. Measure H, a ballot measure that would allow construction of a luxury hotel in Beverly Hills, was losing by six votes one week ago. But according to Friday's tally, the controversial measure is winning by 40 votes.

Two weeks after the election, the ballots are finally counted in Arizona. The delay - more than half a million were uncounted on election day - has left community organizers who registered a record number of Latino voters in Arizona reeling with frustration and suspicion. A crush of hundreds of thousands of early mail-in ballots received a few days before election day is partly to blame for the delay, election officials said. For Instance, Maricopa County recorder's officials were inundated with 200,000 early mail-in ballots just on election day. Statewide, more than 600,000 ballots were left uncounted that day - out of about 2.2 million ballots cast during this year's election.

Former Congresswoman Yvonne Brathwaite Burke stretched her lead over state Sen. Diane Watson to 2,246 votes Thursday, with an estimated 5,000 ballots still to be counted in the race to elect the first African-American to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Neither candidate was ready to declare a winner, choosing to wait for the final tally, which could come at the earliest on Monday, nearly two weeks after the Nov. 3 election.

In the end, it came down to whether an X in a ballot box was a precisely drawn cross, or otherwise was improperly marked or smudged. But on Tuesday, Al Fuentes was installed on the City Council and Ruben Elizalde was left to consider taking the election to court. The election here last week for the only open seat was in limbo for three days as various official and recounts tallies showed a different winner each time.

As many as 6 million votes went uncounted in the 2000 presidential election because of deficiencies in ballots, equipment and voter registration records, a study released Monday showed. "They found the problem more serious than we imagined . . . with perhaps 3 million to 6 million voters disenfranchised by the complications and uncertainties inherent in present technology," Caltech President David Baltimore said.

Voting rights advocates described the election in New Jersey on Tuesday as a "catastrophe," and said significant problems were also cropping up in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania, among other places, although it was not possible to immediately verify all of those reports. In New Jersey, problems stemming from super storm Sandy caused election computers to crash and some polling places were not able to open by late morning, according to Barbara Arnwine, executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. She also said some poll workers were demanding identification from voters, in violation of state law. "There is just a word -- just one word -- to describe the situation around New Jersey, and that is catastrophe," Arnwine said in a teleconference that included representatives of a broad coalition of voting rights and civil rights advocates.The problems were not evident at precincts observed by Times' reporters in New Jersey.

Peg Rosenfield has been monitoring elections for the League of Women Voters in Ohio for almost 40 years and has seen just about every voting glitch imaginable. She says there's a saying among election workers: "Please, God, make it a landslide. " In a landslide, there is no quibbling over hanging chads or provisional ballots or registration requirements or rigged voting machines or whether ballots were cast by the dead. A winner is declared, a loser concedes - election over. No one expects a landslide when Americans go to the polls on Tuesday.

In this humid Southern capital, Florida Secretary of State Glenda E. Hood is feeling the political heat. Lawsuits allege she has disenfranchised poor and minority voters. Critics claim that she's creating a partisan atmosphere. The Republican appointee, whose predecessor, Katherine Harris, figured so prominently in the 2000 election debacle, is pretty fed up. And this year's election is still 12 days away. "These people disappoint me," she said of her many critics.

The $600-million bond measure to fund Los Angeles police and fire facilities appears short of the two-thirds vote needed to pass, but thousands of outstanding ballots must be counted before it can be considered defeated, officials said Wednesday. Of the 356,849 votes cast in Tuesday's election, Proposition Q garnered 66.61%, just .05% short of the 66.66% needed.