Simons scores 25, Sharpe adds 24 as Trail Blazers bounce back with 104-98 win over RocketsMumbai: Amid the suspense over the declaration of the Chief Minister face in Maharashtra, BJP state President Chandrashekhar Bawankule on Saturday announced that the oath-taking ceremony of the Mahayuti government will be held on December 5. The swearing-in ceremony will be held at around 5 pm on December 5 at Azad Maidan in Mumbai. He added that the event will be conducted in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In a social media post on X, Bawankule wrote, “Oath-taking ceremony of the Maha-Yuti Government in Maharashtra. It will be held in the presence of the pride of the world, Prime Minister Narendra Modi Ji on Thursday, December 5, 2024, at 5 PM at Azad Maidan, Mumbai.” Meanwhile, Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Shirsat stated that the caretaker Chief Minister of Maharashtra Eknath Shinde will make a significant decision by Sunday. When asked about the allotment of ministries to allies, Shirsat stated that everything would be clarified by Monday evening. “According to me, whenever Eknath Shinde thinks that he needs some time to think he goes to his native village. By tomorrow evening, he will take a big decision. It can be anything, a political decision.... Everything will be cleared by Monday evening... The oath-taking ceremony should be held before the 5th of December as we have preparations in this manner...” Shirsat told ANI. Eknath Shinde had travelled to his native village in Satara district on Friday. Earlier, on Thursday night, Maharashtra caretaker CM Eknath Shinde, along with Devendra Fadnavis, NCP chief Ajit Pawar and other Mahayuti leaders met Union Home Minister Amit Shah and BJP national president JP Nadda in the national capital. The Maharashtra Assembly election results were declared on November 23, with BJP-led Mahayuti alliance storming back to power with a landslide majority. The ruling alliance, however, is yet to finalise its Chief Minister face. The BJP emerged as the largest party with 132 seats in the 280-member Maharashtra Assembly, while its allies–the Shiv Sena, led by Eknath Shinde, and the NCP, led by Ajit Pawar–won 57 and 41 seats, respectively. (ANI) This report is auto-generated from ANI news service. ThePrint holds no responsibility for its content. Also Read: Eknath Shinde is stronger than ever. He still won’t get the CM chair var ytflag = 0;var myListener = function() {document.removeEventListener('mousemove', myListener, false);lazyloadmyframes();};document.addEventListener('mousemove', myListener, false);window.addEventListener('scroll', function() {if (ytflag == 0) {lazyloadmyframes();ytflag = 1;}});function lazyloadmyframes() {var ytv = document.getElementsByClassName("klazyiframe");for (var i = 0; i < ytv.length; i++) {ytv[i].src = ytv[i].getAttribute('data-src');}} Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Δ document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() );UCF, LSU face off with improved focus in mind7xm casino review philippines 。

By MARC LEVY HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Democratic Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania conceded his reelection bid to Republican David McCormick on Thursday, as a statewide recount showed no signs of closing the gap and his campaign suffered repeated blows in court in its effort to get potentially favorable ballots counted. Casey’s concession comes more than two weeks after Election Day, as a grindingly slow ballot-counting process became a spectacle of hours-long election board meetings, social media outrage, lawsuits and accusations that some county officials were openly flouting the law. Republicans had been claiming that Democrats were trying to steal McCormick’s seat by counting “illegal votes.” Casey’s campaign had accused of Republicans of trying to block enough votes to prevent him from pulling ahead and winning. In a statement, Casey said he had just called McCormick to congratulate him. “As the first count of ballots is completed, Pennsylvanians can move forward with the knowledge that their voices were heard, whether their vote was the first to be counted or the last,” Casey said. The Associated Press called the race for McCormick on Nov. 7, concluding that not enough ballots remained to be counted in areas Casey was winning for him to take the lead. As of Thursday, McCormick led by about 16,000 votes out of almost 7 million ballots counted. That was well within the 0.5% margin threshold to trigger an automatic statewide recount under Pennsylvania law. But no election official expected a recount to change more than a couple hundred votes or so, and Pennsylvania’s highest court dealt him a blow when it refused entreaties to allow counties to count mail-in ballots that lacked a correct handwritten date on the return envelope. Republicans will have a 53-47 majority next year in the U.S. Senate. Follow Marc Levy at twitter.com/timelywriter

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With the election finally over, and America getting ready to celebrate its fall holiday tradition of families not speaking to each other, it’s good to remember that there is one thing that unites us all. In every region of the country, people of every age, race, color, creed, religion and national origin share one common thought: How can California still be counting ballots? For decades, registered California voters would go to the polls in their neighborhood on Election Day, give their name and address to a poll worker sitting at a folding table, sign a paper registry, receive a ballot and vote. Completed ballots were secured in locked boxes and when the polls closed, the ballot boxes would be transported to county offices to be tabulated. County election officials didn’t need weeks to verify the validity of every ballot, because voters had already attested to their identity at the polling places. Vote-by-mail ballots had to be verified, but for a long time that was only a small fraction of total ballots. According to records from the California Secretary of State, mail ballots accounted for just 4.21% of all ballots cast in 1964 general election, 4.5% in 1976, 6.26% in 1980 and 9.33% in 1984. Later, the percentage of mail ballots began to climb. By 2016, more than 57% of ballots were vote-by-mail, and then in 2020, when California began sending a mail ballot to every active registered voter, 86.72% of ballots cast were mail ballots. In 2022, it was 88.64%. California lawmakers fretted that tens of thousands of mail ballots were rejected because they were returned too late, or because the voter had not signed the return envelope, or because the signature did not match the voter registration record on file. So they passed laws that allowed extra time and extra chances for voters to get it right. Counties are now required to accept ballots for seven days after the polls close, even without a postmark, as long as the voter “has dated the vote-by-mail ballot identification envelope or the envelope otherwise indicates that the ballot was executed on or before Election Day.” This and other lenient standards for accepting mail ballots can be found in the California Code of Regulations, Section 20991. In the current election, the counties accepted ballots through Nov. 12. But that’s not the end of the delays. Under state law, counties must notify voters if their ballot hasn’t been accepted due to a missing or mismatched signature and inform them that they can “cure” their signature by signing a form. This year, California enacted another law, Assembly Bill 3184, to ensure that voters are given the maximum amount of time to respond to the notice. Voters have until Dec. 1 to return the signed form. This week, several close races remained undecided with hundreds of thousands of ballots statewide still to count. This does not inspire confidence, especially since many changes to voting and election procedures that California has made in recent years have opened apparent vulnerabilities to cheating. In addition to mailing ballots to voters who did not request them and continuing to accept ballots for seven days after the polls close, the state legalized ballot “harvesting,” which enables an individual to return stacks or sacks of ballots to an unattended drop box or county elections office without triggering legal scrutiny. Before Gov. Jerry Brown signed Assembly Bill 1921 in 2016, only a close relative or member of the same household could return a voter’s mail ballot. Then this year, Newsom signed Senate Bill 1174 to prohibit local governments from adopting a voter ID law. Last year he signed AB 969, making it illegal for counties to hand-count ballots in an election. Voters in California were promised paper ballots that could be audited, but it hasn’t worked out that way. Manual verification of machine-tabulated vote totals has become virtually impossible in the wake of the 2016 Voter’s Choice Act, SB 450, which threw out the local polling place model and allowed voters to cast their ballot in person at any “vote center” in the county. Returned ballots are no longer sorted by precinct. The state’s method of confirming the accuracy of a machine tally was always a manual tally of 1% of the precincts where in-person voting occurred, randomly chosen. That was changed in 2018 to substitute “batches” of ballots for precincts. But how can the public know if those numbers really match? What about recounts? Anyone who is willing to pay the cost may request a recount of any race, but retrieving the paper ballots requires paying county workers for weeks of work to find them. An alternative is to recount optical scans of ballots, but that is costly, too, due to the need for tech workers, computers and monitors. With the previous voting systems, recounts could be conducted by four clerks at a table, and the cost was in the tens of thousands of dollars. But in 2019, then-Secretary of State Alex Padilla decertified all those voting systems everywhere in the state and forced the counties to buy voting technology that counted optical scans. Now recounts cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Some of the state’s actions seem like an engraved invitation to fraud. A 2010 law, SB 1404, required the secretary of state to regulate the tint and watermark on printed ballots. Ahead of every election, an advisory goes up on the state’s website to announce the exact ink color, watermark and printing instructions for official ballots. “The tint for the background and watermark is Pantone 372 U ‘Light Green’ (RGB 212, 238, 141/ CMYK 11, 0, 41, 7),” this year’s advisory explained. Do other states publish instructions for manufacturing official ballots? When so many security vulnerabilities are layered on top of each other, it appears to be possible to steal an election and get away with it. California officials claim they’ve made it easier to vote. It looks like they’ve made it easier to cheat. Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley

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