Posted on 12/04/2008 7:58:19 PM PST by ButThreeLeftsDo
The U.S. Senate recount neared its final hours Thursday, buffeted by the kinds of disputes over missing ballots and challenged ballots that have become familiar in the month since the post-election drama began.
Yet at day's end, with 99 percent of the ballots counted, the gap separating Republican Sen. Norm Coleman and Democrat Al Franken was only 36 votes larger than it had been at the start. Coleman now leads by 251, according to Star Tribune tabulations.
As on Wednesday, the case of 133 missing ballots in Minneapolis held center stage. The city's top election official said she did not know where the ballots were, Franken's campaign pressed for a "systematic forensic search" to find them, and Coleman's lead recount attorney warned Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, a DFLer, to keep politics out of the controversy.
By day's end, Ritchie's office had given the city a waiver to keep its recount open while the search continued, and sent deputy Secretary of State Jim Gelbmann to assist in the hunt and serve as an official "witness" to the investigation.
(Excerpt) Read more at startribune.com ...
...."Ritchie's office had given the city a waiver to keep its recount open while the search continued, and sent deputy Secretary of State Jim Gelbmann to assist in the hunt and serve as an official "witness" to the investigation."....
Ritchie is an ACORN backed and elected hack....
(IMHO)
This is not even close to being over.......
Update from AP:
In further news, Jim Gelbmann’s Uncle Gizmo, who hails from Frankensahack County, and has lived there neigh on 70 years, stumbled out of his house this morning at 2 a.m. on his way to the privy and inexplicably tripped over a box of ballots somehow left in the privy. Now Uncle Gizmo isn’t the brightest bulb in the lamp and had run out of paper, so he used some of these ballots for “personal reasons”. Once done however, he realized they must be important so he cleaned them off as best he could and here they are.
As you can see, the smudge mark by Al Frankens name is larger than the pencil mark by Colemans name, so these must be votes for Franken giving him the lead, even if he’s still behind..
This story is developing..
It ain’t over until Franken’s liberal pals in the Senate steal the election for him, then it’s truly over.
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They need to go ahead and animal trank Franken. If they find the missing 133, Coleman still wins. Franken will never give it up and cannot be allowed for search for votes in perpetuity. He is freakin’ insane, has no class and will press this forever if he is allowed. Load up the trank gun now and take him down. It is for his own good.
They’re not going to do that. The fallout would be huge, and since they can’t get to 60 seats, there’s virtually no payoff for doing so. It would backfire on them big-time. Even if Reid is that stupid, Obama isn’t.
LOL!!! LOL!!!! LOL!!!
LOL!!! LOL!!!! LOL!!!
Oh sorry. I meant to address you instead. LOL!!!!!
Assuming the 133 exist, they know exactly what the vote is for them, because they were counted on election night. With those ballots lost, Franken lost 36 net votes to Coleman.
Either those ballots exist and WERE lost, or they were just over-counted on election night.
“Assuming the 133 exist, they know exactly what the vote is for them, because they were counted on election night. With those ballots lost, Franken lost 36 net votes to Coleman.
Either those ballots exist and WERE lost, or they were just over-counted on election night.”
BINGO!!! It really is that simple, but Franken is trying to insinuate that the votes were never counted.
My suspicion is that a pile of 133 votes were double-counted, i.e., run through the machine twice, on election day. That should be provable by checking the sign-in sheets with the voter check-list counts.
“They’re not going to do that. The fallout would be huge, and since they can’t get to 60 seats, there’s virtually no payoff for doing so. It would backfire on them big-time. Even if Reid is that stupid, Obama isn’t.”
You’re probably right. Without the 60 seats, Franken is probably a bigger liability than asset. He can’t speak without sticking his foot in his mouth.
Different time, different office, different state. That was an executive position - the one person who takes the office controls that branch of government. In a legislative position, the number of seats is what matters. The Democrats already have a comfortable majority, and they can’t get to a filibuster-proof majority, so there’s little incentive for them to try and steal this seat. Secondly, while it’s questionable what really happened, the Washington recount happened under state law and state supervision. That’s very different from an outside body (the U.S. Senate) stepping in to determine the outcome.
>>what nonsense..remember the backfire from the 04 Washington State governor’s race?? crickets chirping<<
I think it’s unlikely that the Dems in congress would want to be seen on CSPAN stealing a state election, to get a seat for someone who is likely to embarrass even them. I don’t need to post images, everyone has seen them.
I’ve noticed that the process tends to discount the “sign-in” sheets, suggesting that if there is a discrepancy, the sign-in sheets are not really controlled and are the most likely thing to be wrong.
We had a convention in our county which was close, and in two precincts there were more votes cast than people who signed in for that precinct.
Originally there were three, but eventually they found errors in the sign-in sheet tallies which makde it at least possible that the 3rd precinct was OK.
But in the end, people were more likely to believe that someone messed up and forgot to check a name on a sheet, than that someone was given a ballot illegally, or someone stuffed the ballot box.
I would love to see a process where everybody had a real voter ID card for national elections, and that the voter id card was “activiated” when you signed in, and then used in the electronic machines. You wouldn’t tie the voter to his votes, but every precinct would dump the list of voters and the list of votes, and they would have to match.
And we could pretty much ensure that nobody voted twice — barring actual fraudulent voting cards, which would be much harder to pull off.
>>And we could pretty much ensure that nobody voted twice — barring actual fraudulent voting cards, which would be much harder to pull off.<<
I think that would be an improvement, but we should also have stricter standards for voter registration. Unfortunately we have too many in govt., including BO, who want to give drivers licenses to illegal aliens, and I suspect that many of them want illegals to vote too, although few would admit it.
Illegals are already counted in the census, which of course affects representation in the US House. IMO that violates the constitution, but what do I know?
“I’ve noticed that the process tends to discount the “sign-in” sheets, suggesting that if there is a discrepancy, the sign-in sheets are not really controlled and are the most likely thing to be wrong.”
I’ve enjoyed your posts on this subject. Where I live (rural Virginia), the sign-in scrutiny was, if anything, heightened in this election. I was asked to provide picture ID, I was questioned re my address, I watched the election officials carefully check off my name against a master sheet, all before I was provided a ballot.
If these provisions were followed in MS, then there would be no question as to what type of error actually occurred in this instance. It’s too bad we don’t have uniform rules on this, but we all know who (and why) is resisting this type of reform.
But they can't vote. They just get counted for apportionment. Of course, from the beginning slaves were counted as 3/5th for apportionment.
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