Voting

Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama dueled to a Super Tuesday draw, capturing states big and small and padding their delegate counts in a Democratic contest that remains highly competitive after the biggest day of balloting in presidential primary history. Obama won 12 of 22 states -- but not California, the day's most coveted prize. Clinton's victory there was powered by overwhelming support from Latinos, who made up nearly 30% of California voters.

The hottest political souvenir in the childhood hometown of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is a small green "Rodham Corner" sign hanging at Wisner and Elm streets, just a few doors from the two-story brick house where she spent her youth. The sign has been stolen so many times that last year city workers bolted it 30 feet up a wooden light pole, said Mayor Howard P. Frimark. "It's been nonstop political talk here ever since Hillary announced her candidacy," Frimark said Tuesday afternoon.

Myanmar's military regime announced Saturday that it would ask voters to approve a new constitution in May to make way for democratic elections in 2010, a move that drew the scorn of a skeptical opposition.

Re "How the voting shook both parties," Feb. 7 Arizona Sen. John McCain's likely presidential nomination by the Republican Party is troubling and confusing. Where are these people who are voting for him? I don't appreciate his insistence that he will eventually unite the GOP, as if he thinks conservatives will fall in line because he has an "R" next to his name. Conservatives vote by principle. I am a conservative first, then a Republican. If he cannot abide the governing philosophy of conservative ideals that the GOP used to believe in, my vote is not his. McCain cannot win without conservatives backing him, hence his sudden apparent conversion.

Wearing electrode-studded headbands to track their brain waves, two subjects watched the campaign commercial on a monitor in front of them. Presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, clutching a microphone as she spoke to an approving crowd, promised that people in need would never be "invisible" to her. When the volunteers heard "invisible," the equipment registered a jolt of electricity in their frontal lobes. "It got their attention," said Brad D. Feldman, an analyst for EmSense Corp.

Michael Nola, a poll worker in Claremont, went to two training sessions before election day and was instructed that nonpartisan voters were entitled to cast ballots in the Democratic Party or American Independent Party primaries. What he never learned in class was that in addition to selecting a candidate, these voters were required to mark a bubble on their ballots indicating which party primary they were voting in. . . .

An estimated 49,500 votes were cast incorrectly in Los Angeles County by nonpartisan voters in the presidential primaries and cannot be counted because the voters' intentions are unclear, acting Registrar Dean Logan said Monday. The mismarked ballots were the result of a confusing ballot design and poor education of poll workers and the public, Logan said.

Six years ago, Los Angeles County began using a ballot for nonpartisan voters that had a little-noticed design flaw. Confusion over how to mark the ballot, critics say, caused tens of thousands of votes to go uncounted in three elections between 2002 and 2006. At the time, election officials knew that some votes were not being counted but saw no need to make changes. After all, the missing votes went unnoticed in the three primary elections and no one complained. That all changed with the Feb.

Darlene Ewing is a Democratic activist, longtime feminist and very frustrated Hillary Rodham Clinton supporter. Like many who have dreamed of seeing a woman in the Oval Office, Ewing doesn't understand why women are drifting in ever-greater numbers away from Clinton toward her rival, Barack Obama. This trend, which has imperiled the candidacy of the woman once considered a shoo-in for her party's nomination, infuriates the frank-talking Texan.

Spain's most prominent Roman Catholic priests have stepped into the center of a bare-knuckle election campaign here, igniting a firestorm by seeming to tell voters how to cast their ballots. The powerful Spanish Bishops Conference, in a recent widely disseminated "message to the public," reminded Catholic voters of their duty to defend traditional values and to elect leaders "responsibly" when they go to the polls Sunday. Catholics make up the vast majority in this country.