Minnesota Canvassing Board in the process of stealing the Senate seat for Franken

Star Tribune ^

[ken21]

i meant what i said.

the pubies don’t seem to have much backbone.

the dems take the pubies out at will, but conversely, the pubies don’t take out dems.

[CharlesWayneCT]

Ballot 7

This is one where there is no vote at all, and there was also no vote for PResident, although they idiot marked the black blocks on the edge. Somehow 51% of the people who looked at this thought it was a vote for Franken. The canvas board agreed.

[luvie]

Well, silly person! That’s a vote for Franken, of course!

Doncha know??

[CharlesWayneCT]

Ballot 13

The board seems to be ignoring most rules, but they are meticulous at throwing out perfectly good ballots like this one if they also have some sort of "identifying mark" on them. Although I couldn't figure out what mark was "identifying" on this one, it was clearly a vote for Coleman, McCain, Bachman, but the board threw it out.

I can hope COlemen didn't get rid of any challenges just because he THOUGHT they wouldn't win. IT's clear that they would have been better just to challenge every single vote for Franken, because who knows if they couldn't get this board to reject a few of them just because they are idiots.

[MSF BU]

Which reminds me of how lucky I am to have my good old Jotul #8. This degree of efficiency this thing operates at is impressive!

[luvie]

Current margin:

Coleman
+358
Ballots reviewed:415

[digital-olive]

It does not make me happy, but if they put up with this and keep sitting on the sidelines with(in general) little effort, they deserve it.

Conservatives didn’t leave the Republican party, the Republican party left them. I think we can bring it back, I am just not going to keep my hopes up for a couple years.

[ken21]

agree.

at the moment, as much as i dislike obamao,

i am more angry at mccain.

[Enchante]

Agreed. They should reject both of those ballots, but they could make some sort of case to accept both. What no rational and fair-minded person could do is to accept one for Franken and reject the other for Coleman. No way.

[Political Junkie Too]

They need a re-vote; I want to see the difference when in-person votes are the only ones that count.

Or the difference when Obama isn't on the ballot.

-PJ

[cyberslave]

The Supreme Court has set down specific guidelines for the apportionment of Congressional Districts. Which means that any redistricting is, and will be, subject to judicial review. Therefore, there is only so much a State Legislature, controlled by either party, can do to Gerrymander their state.

Try to cheer up, this isn't Cuba yet. When we get government guaranteed health care and they take away talk radio we'll be there.

[Lancey Howard]

if the republicans put up with this, then they’re going to be out of power for 30 years.

If the Republicans put up with this they deserve to be out of power for 30 years.

[flintsilver7]

I can see that. However, I can also see that the vast majority of reviewed challenges so far came from Franken, so they should be expected to contain a bunch of worthless time-wasting challenges.

[CharlesWayneCT]

At first I was nervous, because of the “ballot challenge Projection” number. But now I think that is just what the readers voted, not a projection based on how things are going.

There are too few challenges resolved yet to make any good projections. But it can’t be a bad thing that while Franken has only gotten 50 out of 400 votes from his challenges (and coleman has over half the challenges), Coleman got a 3rd of his challenges, and franken only held a 3rd.

Of course, I can’t tell how many franken challenges were votes counted for coleman that he said shouldn’t be, and how many were counted as votes for nobody that franken said should be votes for him.

I’m surprised the canvas board didn’t start by running through every ballot and asking for a vote, and resolving all the ones they were unanimous on without discussion. They should have been able to get rid of half the challenges in a few hours that way.

[flintsilver7]

Yeah, that's the problem I had. I made it up to 35 initially and thought, "This is a total joke." What's the point of going through all of them? They're setting the precedent that a) rules don't matter and b) Franken gets the benefit of the doubt all the time. I notice the wild inconsistency (like you said, an X is sometimes good and sometimes not) and it just seems like there is no consistent methodology.

There are simple rules - no identifying marks and no overvotes. They ruled out a challenge because it looked like there may have been initials on the ballot: http://senaterecount.startribune.com/ballots/index.php?review_date=2008-12-17&index=13 If you're throwing the rules out the window (as they clearly are) how the hell is that not a vote for Coleman?

[Vicki]

Its just a matter of time. They will keep counting the votes until Franken wins.

Is anyone surprised by this?

Not if you are from Washington State. I understand our 'rats sent some help to Franken. You might as well get the experts in there to show them how to "discover and interpret ballots."

We (Republicans) in this state have no power. You can't win elections with this kind of stuff going on.

[flintsilver7]

Yeah, I got a kick out of that one too. It took me a minute to find out there were actually marks near the Senate race.

Again, the verdict should be that these people are far too stupid to have their votes counted.

[madameguinot]

I say that voting should go back to being tied with being a land owner. I am being partially facetious but not. I do think there needs to be a standard of intelligence for the privlege to vote.

Second, the first vote looks like it was done by an idiot (prototypical Obama/Franken voter)

The second was doctored.

REVOTE Minnesota!!

[Cheerio]

Its just a matter of time. They will keep counting the votes until Franken wins. Is anyone surprised by this?

This is the same scenario as in the Washington State Governors race - waiting for King County so they could know the exact number that was needed.

[CharlesWayneCT]

I note that a lot of voters identified their ballots. Not sure why they have a law that says that any identifying marks on a ballot would invalidate the ballot. But the board took that seriously.

The only thing I can see that would suggest that voters might mistakenly vote for Coleman, and then have to cross it out to vote for Franken, is that on most of the other entries the Democrat is 2nd, but on the Senate Coleman is second. There were several challenges that I agreed were clearly Franken votes by intent,where the coleman vote was crosssd out, or in one case the word “NO” written next to it.