Regarding Keith Judd

[struggle4progress]

Today the press has been joking about the fact that a convicted felon behind bars got 40% of the Dem primary vote in WV. In a way, I guess that's fair: Judd's candidacy is clearly a joke

But let's look at some numbers

There are about 1227K registered voters in WV: 641K Dems, 352K Repubs, and a mix of other smaller parties

178K Dems voted: about 28%
111K Repubs voted: about 32%

The top three vote getters were:

Obama 106K
Romney 75K
Judd 73K

Judd beat Santorum by 58K, Paul by 60K, and Gingrich by 66K: in fact Judd, got 39K more votes than Santorum, Paul, and Gingrich combined

More interestingly, Judd was less than 3K votes behind Romney

So just about the same number of West Virginians voted for Romney as voted for a convicted felon behind bars

[tularetom]

1. Can voters cross party lines in this primary?

If so that would sort of explain the large vote for Judd.

Well that and the fact that a lot of the voters (even Democrats) voted against the idea of having a black guy in the white house.

[struggle4progress]

2. The Secretary of State webpages say:

... West Virginia has a "closed" primary, which means that people registered in one party cannot vote for candidates in another party. At the Primary Election, if you have listed a major party choice on your voter registration, you will be given the ballot of that major party. You will not have the right to receive the ballot of a different party ... The Democratic, Mountain and Republican Parties allow any voter who is not registered with an official major party to request their ballot for the Primary Election, but you have to ask the poll workers for a particular party ballot ... A voter may change party affiliation by submitting a voter registration form showing the change to the County Clerk, or at any Motor Voter office. The registration change must be made at least 21 days before the Primary Election in order to vote in the new party at the polls in the Primary Election. If the change is made later, it will apply at the next Primary Election ... http://www.sos.wv.gov/elections/currentelection/Pages/Political_Parties_in_West_Virginia.aspx#4

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

3. That old 2008 WV primary photo of the old ladies with the "NO HUSSIAN" sign pretty much says it all.

Interestingly I can't find that ANYWHERE on the web now. It was in an old Yahoo News slide show and it seems to have vanished since they changed up their site.