Florida Has Nothing on Minnesota

Being a resident of MN I am smack dab in the middle of the Coleman/Franken recount debacle. This is, without a doubt, the shadiest process I have ever seen. As you may recall Coleman had bested Franken by a mere 725 votes on election day. In Minnesota whenever a race closes within 0.5% it triggers an automatic recount. By all means that is a good thing and an appropriate thing. The problem is that this process is rife with corruption. By Wednesday night, that lead had shrunk to 477. By Thursday night, it was down to 336. By Friday, it was 239. Late Sunday night, the difference had gone down to just 206 -- a total change over 4 days of 519 votes. Here are just some things that have happened since last Tuesday:

• For the entire state, all 4130 precincts, a total of 486 changes were made to the Presidential, House, and State House races. So that is all the changes for all the races in all the precincts. Al Franken, however, has alone received 519 additional votes from just 3 precincts! This of course is not impossible, but the statistical probability of this is astronomically small.
• A Ramsey County judge ruled in favor of Al Franken in allowing late absentee ballots to be counted. The law states that absentee ballots have to be delivered by end of day on Nov. 4th. In this case they weren't. If the absentee ballots were sent out late initially by the government a case could be made for allowing them to be returned after Nov. 4th. But there is no indication that the ballots were sent out late. This ruling now allows any "lost" absentee ballots that now show up to count. Amazingly and against all probability, every single absentee ballot found so far has been for Al Franken.
• MN has a canvassing board that is responsible for recounting all ballots by hand and determining voter intent. The board is made up of 2 MN Supreme Court Justices, 2 District Court Justices, and the Secretary of State (who has connections to ACORN). Local officials will look at a ballot and if Al's name is circled or underlined or anything other than what it's supposed to be, one of the local officials can say, "hey, I think this ballot is a vote for Al." The other local official can disagree and now it gets sent to the MN canvassing board. So now these 5 people (3 of which or Democrats) will determine voter intent. We can't determine our Founding Fathers intent they say, but apparently we can determine a voters intent. So what happens if a ballot has the circle filled in for Coleman AND Franken? How do we determine the "intent" on that one? The whole process is ridiculous.
• One county election official in Mt. Iron, MN, went back and updated his totals to include an extra 100 votes for both Obama and Franken. The claim is that at the end of the day the official was tired and forgot to type in the results correctly. Again, to be tired and make a mistake is understandable. Where I see the problem is that he made the exact same typo for 2 different races. The statistical probability that he would make the exact same mistake on two separate races is well beyond reason.

One other problem we have in Minnesota is same-day voter registration. I have not heard one single argument in favor of this that can hold any water. So please, anyone who can tell me why same day voter registration is a good thing I'd like to hear it. The downside of same-day voter registration is that you can have massive amounts of voter fraud. If you are required to pre-register then your name goes on the books with the election officials. With same day registration its not. So now election officials can say, "Oh wait, we found all these extra ballots that we didn't turn in." Then they can claim they were all same day registrants that forgot to sign the rolls and there isn't a single thing you can do to stop them. I just don't see how the benefits of a same day registration program can outway the potential for fraud.