Norm needs to save his time and money. The fix was in and no masked man is coming to the rescue.
After the recount, the (MN) Secretary of State has some explaining to do
Morrison County Record (MN)
Tom West General Manager/Editor
January 16, 2009
I don’t know about you, but the more I read about the Senate recount battle between Norm Coleman and Al Franken, the more upset I am with the slipshod way the election was conducted.
Now, I want to make clear that I am not referring here to Morrison County Auditor Russ Nygren, his staff or this county’s many election judges. This county was involved in six recounts (two city council, three legislative and the Coleman-Franken race) and except for a few counting errors, and perhaps one improperly rejected absentee ballot, no other mistakes were uncovered. The recounts of the council and legislative races verified the initial result. Only the Senate race remains in limbo, but only because of problems that occurred elsewhere in the state, particularly Minneapolis.
The state Canvassing Board said that Franken had 225 more votes in the recount than Coleman. However, a widespread misunderstanding exists of what the Canvassing Board was expected to do. Its job was to count the ballots as presented to them. The contested decisions on which ballots were either improperly withheld or presented to the Canvassing Board still need to be decided in court. In fact, the Minnesota Supreme Court, in several rulings last month, invited a lawsuit to resolve those issues.
Except for a few extreme partisans, I think most Minnesotans want to be sure that all legal votes are counted. However, I doubt now that we will ever know if that happened. Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, as the chief election officer of the state, is responsible for the mess along with a number of county auditors and city election officials. Part of Ritchie’s job is to train the county auditors, and in the larger cities the city clerk or chief election officials, how to conduct a fair election. It’s the job of those he trains to then teach the election judges their duties. It’s clear that as teachers, Ritchie and some others are lacking.
That became obvious when both the Franken and Coleman campaigns agreed that 1,346 absentee ballots were wrongly rejected all across the state by local election officials. Those ballots were crucial to the outcome. At the heart of Coleman’s lawsuit challenging the Canvassing Board result, however, are an additional 654 absentee ballots that Coleman thinks should be included, but Franken did not.
In one of the Supreme Court rulings, it was decided that only the rejected ballots upon which the two campaigns agreed should be included in the recount. However, the campaigns have no special standing in this recount; it’s the people’s will and the integrity of the voting process that is in question. If Franken or Coleman objected to including a ballot, then the judgement of local officials, who had already acknowledged 1,346 mistakes, was allowed to stand.
That the Secretary of State did not step in and ask the Supreme Court for statewide uniformity in determining whether ballots were wrongly rejected, reflects poorly on his leadership. (I should note that on this point alone, for Coleman to win the overall election, he probably would need 60 percent of the 654 ballots to be in his favor, compared to 25 percent for Franken and 15 percent for Dean Barkley or other third party candidates. That’s not likely to happen; probably the best he could do on this point is to push the margin under 100 votes.)
But other issues remain. Coleman alleges that absentee ballots may have been counted twice in 17 Minneapolis, one St. Louis Park and three St. Louis County precincts. The reason for the double-counting most likely is that many absentee ballots get folded into envelopes and mailed and then won’t go through the counting machines. The law is clear that when that happens, the election judges are to make a duplicate ballot, mark it as “duplicate” and the original ballot as “original” and then feed only the duplicate through the machine. That apparently didn’t happen in those 21 precincts. Again, that is a training issue. But these precincts voted 65 percent for Franken, and only 21.7 percent for Coleman, so if 150 votes were counted twice, using those same percentages alone, Coleman could pick up about 66 votes.
In two other precincts, Maplewood Precinct 6 and St. Paul Ward 3 Precinct 9, more votes were cast than there were voters. In Maplewood, the explanation is that the judges tried to run the absentee ballots through during the middle of the day and were interrupted, and didn’t get some of them included until after doing the final machine count. Still, the count shows 31 more ballots than voters. And then there is the infamous Minneapolis Ward 3 Precinct 1, where 133 ballots allegedly turned up missing. The original count is still being used, which increases Franken’s margin of victory by 46 votes. How can a recount include numbers with no paper trail? Most likely, those ballots never existed, but 133 others were double counted.
Ritchie keeps saying that this is a fair and impartial recount. How would he or anyone else know that with any certainty? He has a lot of explaining to do. What will he do to avoid a repeat? In addition, if Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak doesn’t do anything to clean up that city’s election division, he should forget about his gubernatorial bid. Thankfully, the Legislature is holding hearings on election reform. Lawmakers would do well to start by focusing on training issues.
