“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.
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.