Canvass changes Democratic caucus results slightly

Hillary Clinton’s lead in New Mexico’s Feb. 5 caucus decreased slightly today when the Democratic Party announced canvassed results of the regular and absentee votes.

The new and final results for the regular and absentee ballots are 68,084 votes for Clinton and 67,010 votes for Barack Obama, giving Clinton a 1,074-vote lead.

That doesn’t include the more than 17,000 provisional ballots that are still being considered. The party has qualified about 7,000 of those ballots, but is still sorting through the rest. Actual counting of the provisional ballots is expected to begin Wednesday and be complete by Friday.

Before the canvass, the party’s unofficial results from the regular and absentee vote had Clinton with a 1,123-vote lead, 68,654 votes to Obama’s 67,531, so the results changed slightly.

The canvassed results include 2,070 votes for John Edwards, 1,236 votes for Bill Richardson, 536 votes for Dennis Kucinich, 112 votes for Joe Biden and 70 votes for Chris Dodd.

The party stated in a news release announcing the canvassed results that 157,354 total votes were cast. That’s a 54-percent increase over the approximately 102,000 that were cast in 2004.