The ridiculousness of the Minnesota Senatorial election between Al Franken and Norm Coleman has reached its height, and the Wall Street Journal has been doing an excellent job of chronicling the details of how a close election can be stolen.
The final twist, which helped push Franken from being down by a few hundred votes to being ahead by a similar margin, was the decision by Democratic Secretary of State Mark Ritchie and the other members of the Canvassing Board which is overseeing the recounts, to count a number of duplicate ballots — in addition to the regular ballots filed by those same voters. In Minnesota, when a ballot is damaged, election officials are required to make a duplicate of it, mark the duplicate clearly as a duplicate, and store it separately from the regular ballots. Apparently, the duplicates in 25 precincts were not clearly marked, and in response to demands from the Franken campaign, the Canvassing Board decided to throw reasonable caution and responsibility to the wind and treat those duplicates as additional ballots to be counted.
You might wonder how we know those ballots are duplicates. Simple. In each of those precincts, after the votes were recounted, there were more ballots counted than there were voters who signed in at the polls. There were enough more to gain Franken an additional 80 to 100 votes. The only way for that to happen is for some voters to have voted twice. This poor decision is just one of many choices made by the Canvassing Board about which ballots to reject and which ones to accept which seem to scream bias, if not on the part of the entire board, then certainly on the part of Secretary Ritchie, who is guiding the process. Rules are being applied inconsistently and haphazardly, but apparently always to the benefit of Franken.
Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - Brunelleschi
Blah blah blah.
Bush's first election shows us how much the righties care about fair elections.
I like Franken so much I don't care if he gets in by tactics. He's going to be worth listening too in the Senate, and hopefully entertaining.
Wouldn't it be great if he gets the floor on the Senate and starts doing Stuart Smalley? "I hope I make a good speech today. I didn't like my last speech very much and I had to look in the mirror. I said 'self, you are a Senator. You can make a good speech today. You are good enough, you are smart enough and doggone it people like you.."
2 - Dr Dreadful
The election was a tie. Hold a runoff already.
3 - Brunelleschi
Boring.
Put the comedian in!
4 - zingzing
hey, dave--i'd bet that both sides used dirty tactics, probably illegal. what's your bet?
5 - Derek
Dave, why are you using the old throwing shit and hoping it sticks act? You haven't followed the race and just listen to what Rush "I go to South America for pills and 14 year olds" Limbaugh has to say and deem it to be true. There's no evidence of double votes, and if you had a clue, the machines wouldn't count the original ballots, so they used copied ballots to count them. So how could a machine that wouldn't read the ballot somehow read it? Makes no sense.
6 - Dave Nalle
Actually, Zing, on reading about the election I was surprised to find how little the Coleman campaign had done, including not really pursuing legitimate opportunities to challenge Franken's skullduggery. I think that pretty early on they realized that the Canvassing Board and the various election officials had already decided they were going to find a way to hand the election to Franken, so the Coleman folks just decided to let them do their worst so they'd have lots of juicy stuff to go to court with.
Dave
7 - Baritone
Dave,
If I'm not mistaken, Ritchie is the ONLY Democrat on the canvassing board. Are we to assume that he has the muscle to force the other members to his will? As Zing suggests, there has been crap flung by both camps in this recount.
"...there is no way that Franken will be taken seriously if he is seated. He will be a pariah and a liability and held up as an object lesson to others, rather like a Macbeth for the modern era."
That I believe is more your hope than what will actually happen. If seated, it will be up to Franken as to how effectively he functions within the Senate. If he fucks up or is found to be inept, then he will not be embraced by his fellow Senators. However, should he prove to be effective, I doubt seriously that the Senate will see him as "a pariah and a liability."
B
8 - zingzing
dave, they're politicians. their job is to get elected. with all the accusations that have gone each direction, do you really think coleman is a) clean enough and b) stupid enough NOT to have tried his hardest?
from what i can tell, coleman is a fairly moderate republican (or else he wouldn't get elected in minnesota), and franken is... a comedian. a smart comedian, but a comedian none-the-less. of course, i'd like to see a dem in office, but i wouldn't be upset if coleman ends up winning.
still, i'm not (acting) naive enough to say that franken is the only one playing the game here.
9 - Dan(Miller)
Baritone,
If he fucks up or is found to be inept, then he will not be embraced by his fellow Senators.
Thanks for making it all clear. Now I realize that I have been living in an alternative universe. How can I get to that better world of which you speak?
Dan(Miller)
10 - Ruvy
I'll just repeat what I've said many times before. No matter which of these jokers eventually gets the Senate seat, Minnesotans lose.
Coleman is a rich asshole who pals around with his friends in the mob.
Franken is an arrogant asshole who pals around with his friends in the media.
Both of these pricks are rolling in dough.
Neither give a damn about people who have to get up at 3 in the morning to go to second rate, low paying jobs at Target because there is nothing else in the state of Minnesota. Put simply, the Twin Cities are mildly bad off while outstate is getting screwed.
11 - Ruvy
And before anybody asks why I'm commenting on Minnesota politics all the way from my roost in the Samarian mountains, I'll remind you I speak Minnesotan like a native, lived there for two decades, and was active in the DFL.
12 - El Bicho
If the WSJ is doing such a great job reporting, why have you linked to an opinion piece, whose author's name I can't find on the page, rather than a news article?
13 - El Bicho
"If I'm not mistaken, Ritchie is the ONLY Democrat on the canvassing board."
You are right. That's why Dave didn't mention anyone else's party affiliation. Why Republican appointees would "find a way to hand the election to Franken" is rather a ridiculous notion. The Coleman folks might also have realized they don't have a legal leg to stand on.
14 - Tref
Sour grapes! Face it, chap, nobody cares about the neocons anymore. Bye bye! Go, Franken, go!
15 - Jet
I was under the impression that those were "provisional" ballots, which were filed if the voter registered in time to vote, but not soon enough to get his name on the voter roles.
In that case the voter is given a paper ballot to fill out and after it's later checked as authentic, it's counted, but usually only if the election is close, which this one was.
A simple double check of the voter's information would prove it was a valid vote and not a double-counted vote as you seem to be rather lamely implying Dave, and is relatively easy to verify against the roles of people who already voted.
As evidenced by the previous comments Dave, your bias is showing... better tuck it in before it gets you in trouble, and/or damages your credibility.
---------
Here in Ohio, the GOP has discovered that all those union voters that couldn't get out of their jobs in the past to vote, were voting early on their days off this time. Which is what cost the GOP Ohio.
In an effort to fix this, the GOP dominated Ohio congress is trying to shorten or do away all together with early voting...
Gee, I wonder why?
16 - Clavos
He's going to be worth listening too in the Senate, and hopefully entertaining.
I doubt it. He certainly isn't entertaining on TV. His Stuart Smalley character is puerile and asinine, and definitely not funny -- or even mildly entertaining.
Franken's an obnoxious asshole.
17 - zingzing
oh, clavos. i doubt he'd be so obnoxious if he was republican. who's that conservative comedian? um... larry the cable guy? please don't tell me you prefer label the cable guy to franken. or please, tell me that you do.
and anytime a southern republican says "asinine," i just start reading the rest of your comment in hank hill's voice. now that's good meat, bobby.
18 - Dr Dreadful
Larry the Cable Guy does politics??! I thought the conservative humor flag-bearer was the equally (as Franken) unfunny Dennis Miller.
Comedy and partisan politics just don't sit well together. You're alienating half your potential audience before you even start if you go down that road.
Comedy is irreverent and functions best when its targets aren't restricted to a single ideology. That's what makes Leno, Letterman, Stewart and Colbert funny: although their personal politics are well-known, they're just as likely to make fun of Democrats as they are of Republicans.
Even Ben Elton* realized that and dropped the socialist red flag-waving from his routine long ago. He instantly became ten times funnier.
* For our American readers: Elton is a British stand-up comedian, comedy writer and author. He's probably best-known in the US as the co-creator of Blackadder.
19 - Jet
Your hero Ronald Reagan was one of the most putrid actors, and yet he went on to be gov of California and then President of the United States
Can you people more hypocrites than you already have proven here?
20 - Dr Dreadful
Putrid?
Reagan was certainly no Clark Gable, but he wasn't abysmally bad - just ordinary.
As an actor I'd say he was probably better than Schwarzenegger but worse than Fred Thompson.
(Isn't it odd how all the prominent politicians who used to be actors in supposedly left-wing Hollywood seem to be Republicans?)
21 - Clavos
zing,
These are ALL obnoxious AND/or low class and unfunny -- larry the cable guy, franken, dennis miller, gilbert gottfried (especially!), rodney dangerfield, groucho marx, chris rock, don rickles, phyllis diller, andy kaufman, jim carrey, andrew dice clay, Sam kinison, bill maher, roseanne barr, etc., etc. -- ad infinitum.
good comedians -- bob hope, bill cosby, robin williams, bob newhart, jonathan winters, jon stewart (most of the time), johnny carson, alan king, david steinberg, george burns, jackie gleason, cheech & chong, lily tomlin, pat paulsen, the smothers brothers, mel brooks, carl reiner, dana carvey, jerry lewis, etc., etc.
As you can see, their politics has little to do with it for me. More than anything I like them to be funny, without being mean-spirited, obnoxious or low-rent.
Too many contemporary ones are assholes.
22 - Clavos
...a southern republican...
I'm not a southern anything -- I'm barely American, I was born in Mexico and carry dual cirtizenship, and I live in Miami, which (proudly) isn't part of the United States, culturally.
And I'm a RINO, and that only because the state of Florida forces me to declare either Republican or Democrat or be disenfranchised.
23 - zingzing
bah. bobby.
groucho marx and andy kaufman aren't funny?
and robin williams and dana carvey are?
there is no accounting for personal taste.
24 - Clavos
No, andy kaufman was definitely not funny in my book; I thought his act was stupid.
Groucho was funny, but decidedly low class, and I didn't (and don't) like slapstick, so I found the marx brothers act boring.
25 - zingzing
i always liked groucho for his verbal wit. the slapstick was pretty good, but it's groucho's quick mouth that's the keeper. and he was just low class, he was absolutely vulgar.
and kaufman, not funny? stupid? you do know that was the joke, right? he was a marvelous thinker. he went somewhere no one had gone before in comedy, and they can't go back there again without merely ripping him off. he's an original.