Franken Wins, Franken Wins

I went back and read my post from Nov. 11th of last year. That was the article where I discussed the shady business going on in the election recount between Norm and Big Al. I won't get into that here again, but if you read what I wrote you can see there were a great many things that were questionable at best. Well, the hits just keep on coming as it appears the Canvassing Board will be certifying Al Franken as the winner of the MN Senate election.

The only problem with that is the process just keeps getting shadier and shadier as the days roll along. (See the Ballot Madness link below). The latest shenanigans involve duplicate votes. Under MN law whenever a ballot is damaged on election night, election officials are required to create a duplicate. The duplicates are to be clearly labeled as such and set aside. Easy enough, right? Wrong. After the recent recount, there are now 25 precincts that have higher vote totals than marked voters who showed up to vote on election day. But it gets worse. Hennepin County actually came in after the recount with 133 fewer votes than what was tallied on election night. Franken protested to the Canvassing Board and set the precedent that the election night totals would be used. This benefited Franken with 46 additional votes. However, a Ramsey County (yes, that Ramsey County I previously blogged about) precinct ended up with 177 more ballots after the recount. The Canvassing Board decided that precidence be damned and decided to go with the hand recount total. Franken gained an additional 37 votes in that ordeal.

But we aren't done yet. Next comes the dispute over absentee ballots. Our Secretary of State decided he was going to count, and certify, absentee ballot totals before all the precints had reported their totals. Why? Probably because the Franken-leaning counties had all submitted their absentee totals before the Coleman-leaning precints had. As far as I have been able to tell, every single issue dealing with challenged or contested ballots that has gone before the Canvassing Board has ruled in favor of Franken. I'm in no way saying that they should all have been in favor of Coleman, or even 50/50. But to be so utterly lopsided in favor of one candidate defies not only probability, but logic.


Here are just a few articles detailing this insanity:

• Funny Business in Minnesota - WSJ
• Ballot Madness - FoxNews
• Coleman's Request For Absentee Ballots Rejected - FoxNews
• About Those Same Ballots - MSNBC
• 1500 Ballots Reinstated for Franken - KARE11
• Franken's Coup - NewsMax

And lest we forget what happened in Washington state 4 years ago.

One last thing. I've had some friends tell me that complaining about how Franken has "won" this election is no different than what the Democrats were saying about the Florida debacle. You remember the liberal mantra "Bush was selected, not elected." The liberals back then are making the same claims that I'm making now with this race, that the courts are in essensce selecting Franken despite what the voters wanted. The two situations are not the same though. Here's the difference. In 2000, Al Gore went to court in an effort to recount a bunch of absentee ballots that were not counted on election day. The reason they were not counted is because they were not delivered to the precincts in time. I touched on this in one of my previous posts, but absentee ballots must all be turned into the precincts by election night. The only possible reason to put an extension in place is if the state was lax in sending out the absentee ballots on time. In Florida's defense, all the ballots were sent out on time. So while the Florida Supreme Court agreed to recount these absentee ballots, the challenge to the US Supreme Court overruled the states decision. In no way did the US Supreme Court rule in favor of Bush, they simply upheld the law. So the claims that Bush was "selected" and not "elected" is just plain false. The situation in Minnesota is completely different.