Obama Closing In On 8 Million Vote Win Over McCain

As the counting of votes continues across the nation, President-Elect Barack Obama is closing in on a win by 8 million votes over John McCain. The latest national popular vote count puts Barack Obama well ahead of John McCain by a lopsided 65,431,955 votes to McCain's 57,434,084 with voting trending towards Obama that should continue for a few more days before every state certifies their state vote as official.

While some states such as Oregon and Washington used what was considered to be an advanced mail-in vote system to help prevent election and polling station problems, an extremely long ballot in Oregon with numerous ballot measures has only slowed the counting, where some larger counties such as Washington County may still have as many as 15,000 more ballots yet to be counted. And Washington state allowed any ballot that was postmarked by election day to count, so as late mail shows up at state election offices, new ballots are counted and added to the state totals.

In some other states, a number of other ballots may still remain to be counted as well, and the trend has been for most of these ballots to be trending towards Barack Obama as well, so his total should eventually exceed 8 million more votes than John McCain.

There is also the Senate race in Minnesota still at stake, where there hasn't been any new votes counted in several days, but a recount is looming where Democrat Al Franken narrowly trails incumbent Republican Senator Norm Coleman by just 221 votes. This senate seat remains too close to call, and it is not clear whether any other votes remain to be counted or whether Al Franken's hopes are pinned on errors in the counting, which is unlikely to change many more than just a handful of votes in most cases.

But Senator Barack Obama, the lopsided vote is of near landslide proportions, and is the biggest vote total for an American candidate for president ever cast. This big vote total is in itself of historic proportions.