Obama Wins Handily in Mississippi

Barack Obama, as expected, won the Mississippi primary 61% to 37%. Meanwhile, the state party leaders in Texas have announced that the final tally of the Texas caucuses (The second step, in the "Teaxas Two Step" primary and caucus process) will be announced on March 29. With 41% of the counties caucuses polled, Obama leads 56% to 44% over Hillary Clinton).

With his win in Mississippi, Obama has 1,596 delegates, including separately chosen party and elected officials known as superdelegates. Clinton has 1,484, according to The Associated Press count.

The popular vote tally is complicated. Blake Fleetwood at the Huffington Post reports that "Obama has the lead in the delegates and in the popular vote, but that is not exactly true as far as the votes are concerned, according to Clinton supporters. The figures from NBC are:

Including Florida And Michigan, Clinton wins by 30,657:
Clinton 13,521,832
Obama 13,497,175

In the Approved Contests Obama wins by 598,266:
Obama 12,920,961
Clinton 12,322,695

With Florida, where both were on the ballot, Obama wins by 303,494
Obama 13,497,175
Clinton 13,193,681"

With it 99.9% likely that Michigan and Florida will have mail-in "do over" primaries, Obama's and Clinton's campaigns are going to have their work cut out to wrap up the delegates ahead of the convention.

Early Voting Heavy in Texas and Ohio

Voters in Ohio and Texas apparently understand the importance of their vote in determining next Tuesday's primaries in Texas and Ohio. With early voting closing in Texas today, as of Wednesday, 584,994 Texans in the state's 15 most populous counties had voted Democratic. In Ohio, early voting in six of the largest counties is being compared to the turnout in the 2004 general election.

Also, a judge struck down a county's challenge to Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner's Jan. 2, 2008 directive requiring backup paper ballots by boards of elections using touch-screen (direct recording electronic-DRE) voting machines in the March 4 presidential primary election.

The case was brought by Union County commissioners who sought to challenge the secretary's authority to issue the directive, arguing that it unlawfully mandated two types of voting systems.
Calling the secretary's directive one that "merely directs how Union County's existing voting equipment will be used," the judge found that the county commissioners lacked standing to attack the secretary's directive and that the failure of the county board of elections to be a party deprived the court of the ability to proceed on the merits.

Meanwhile in the polls, Barack Obama holds a slight lead on Hillary Clinton in Texas and has almost pulled even in Ohio before contests that could decide their Democratic presidential battle, according to a Reuters/C-SPAN/Houston Chronicle poll released on Friday.

The contests on Tuesday are crucial for Clinton, a New York senator and former first lady fighting to halt Obama's streak of 11 consecutive victories in their battle for the Democratic nomination for the November 4 presidential election.

Obama, an Illinois senator, has a 6-point edge on Clinton in Texas, 48 percent to 42 percent. He trails Clinton 44 percent to 42 percent in Ohio -- well within the poll's margin of error of 3.8 percentage point