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Politics: The former Stuart Smalley becomes the 60th Democrat in the U.S. Senate, thanks to the community organizers at Acorn and the little-known Secretary of State Project. Is the system being rigged?Politics: The former Stuart Smalley becomes the 60th Democrat in the U.S. Senate, thanks to the community organizers at Acorn and the little-known Secretary of State Project. Is the system being rigged? Incumbent Republican Norm Coleman conceded defeat in the mother of all recounts in Minnesota's U.S. Senate race after the state's Supreme Court unanimously rejected his lawsuit. Arguably, his seat may have been lost the day in 2006...

The National Republican Senatorial Committee spent almost $1 million last month on Republican Norm Coleman's attempt to win last year's U.S. Senate race. Coleman is attempting to overturn Democrat Al Franken's slender lead. The former senator's appeal of a trial court's decision that Franken won is awaiting a ruling from the Minnesota Supreme Court. That ruling could be issued any day. Last month, the NRSC spent $937,917 to help Coleman in that effort. Minneapolis law firm Dorsey & Whitney, home to Coleman attorney Jim Langdon, received $350,171 of that and Washington, D.C., law firm Patton Boggs, Coleman legal spokesman Ben...

A review of Minnesota’s statewide database of registered voters revealed at least 2,812 deceased individuals voted in last November’s general election, according to a new report by the “traditional values” advocacy group Minnesota Majority. After obtaining the list of voters who participated in November’s election, the group hired an independent firm who specializes in “death suppression” for direct mailing lists to review the data. The process, which involved matching names and addresses to state death records, bore troubling results. According to Minnesota statute 201.13, the commissioner of health is to report monthly the name, address, date of birth, and county...

Democrat Al Franken's lead in Minnesota's U.S. Senate race has grown to 312 votes now that hundreds of absentee ballots have been added to the counting. A three-judge panel ruled that the rejected absentee ballots should be opened and counted after hearing weeks of testimony in a lawsuit brought by Republican Norm Coleman. Franken led by 225 votes going into Tuesday's count of those absentee ballots. The judges allowed 351 absentees into the count and Franken picked up more of them than Coleman did. Other issues are still pending in Coleman's lawsuit, and he has said he will appeal to...

The three-judge panel assigned to oversee the upcoming recount trial between Norm Coleman and Al Franken heard arguments this afternoon on Franken's motion to dismiss the case. After lawyers for Republican Coleman and DFLer Franken made their cases, the judges said they would take the case under advisement. They gave no sign of when a decision would come. The trial is scheduled to begin Monday. Franken attorney David Burman argued today that both state law and the Constitutions of Minnesota and the United States limit what state courts may do in reviewing the recount, and that remaining issues should be...

FOX "The O'Reilly Factor"Video: "Minnesota Madness" Segment Aired Friday, January 9, 2008       Bill and two Republican guests(1) discuss Hollywood’s and George Soros massive donations to elected “Porn-o-Rama” Franken. This includes, a rare and calculated move(2), by George Soros who personally held a large post-election Franken fundraiser at his residence in New York City to support Al in the ballot recount/contest(3). I wrote about and published the list of Hollywood/high profile Franken donors three days before this news piece, not that this was new Soros Shadow Party news for anyone that has closely followed/been involved in this Coleman-Franken fiasco....

- - Former GOP MN secretary of state says absentee ballots should not have been included in recount Former Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer is now criticizing the handling of the U.S. Senate election recount in the race between Democrat Al Franken and Republican Norm Coleman that ended with Franken on top. Kiffmeyer, R-Big Lake, now a freshman state representative from District 16B, did not speak publicly about the recount while it was ongoing, but is willing to talk about it now that the results are certified and the dispute has moved into the courts. Kiffmeyer, who from 1999 to...

George Soros is the biggest sugar daddy of the Democratic Party, and naturally wants to ensure that the Democrats have a monopoly of power in America. Recently, I wrote an article for American Thinker on the role that George Soros has played in helping the Democrat Al Franken in his race against the Republican incumbent Norm Coleman for a Senate seat in Minnesota. However, there may be one other reason that Soros was determined that Norm Coleman in particular lose his seat. This was personal. Norm Coleman was the chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and as...

Send in the Clown It sounds like the plot of a 1990s straight-to-video Hollywood flick, but barring any dramatic developments – such as a successful court challenge by Republican opponent Norm Coleman – former “Saturday Night Live” cast member and comedian Al Franken will become the next U.S. Senator from Minnesota, likely on the strength of fraudulent votes. Franken’s fitness for office has been a matter of debate ever since he announced his candidacy in February 2007. Having made a career of “debunking” provocative statements made by famous conservatives in books like Rush Limbaugh Is a Big, Fat Idiot, The...

The highly publicized vote recount in the Minnesota Senate race between Democrat Al Franken and Republican Norm Coleman is shining a light on Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, the state’s chief election officer. Ritchie is chairman of the Minnesota Canvassing Board, which on Monday certified that Franken received 225 more votes than Coleman did. Ritchie gave partial credit for his 2006 election to a liberal 527 group, the Secretary of State Project, which says its goal is to “ensure fair, clean elections” by replacing conservative secretaries of state with liberal Democrats. “I want to thank the Secretary of State...

The state canvassing board finished up its second day of sorting through challenged ballots Wednesday and said it hoped to be done with all challenges in the U.S. Senate race by the end of the week. But Secretary of State Mark Ritchie said the board would not certify a winner Friday, and there were new signs that court challenges lie ahead and could push Minnesota's process of selecting a Senator into 2009. (LEGAL ISSUE 1) One issue that could end up in court involves "duplicate" ballots -- ballots filled in on Election Day if there's something wrong with a voter's...

12.10.08 VIDEO: Secretary of State Mark Ritchie discusses the Recount of the 2008 Senate Race in Minnesota between Norm Coleman and Al Franken. These remarks are part of a forum held on "The Minnesota Tradition of Fair Elections" hosted by the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota. 12.12.08 VIDEO: Ritchie On Counting Improperly Rejected Absent Ballots # # # # # 11.20.08 VIDEO: Minnesota Majority (Standing Together for Traditional Values) blasts commie Soros puppet SOS Mark Ritchie. Announce they are filing a formal complaint with the U.S....

WHO IS MARK RITCHIE? A COMPLETE BACKGROUND Photo from Team Franken’s Flickr page(1) of non-partisan Secretary of State Mark Ritchie speaking at a Minnesota Democrats event earlier this year. UPDATE: Liberal supporters of Secretary of State Mark Ritchie (Media Matters)(2) are trying to defend him from the accusation that his candidacy had been promoted by the Communist Party USA. As the blogger who broke the story about his candidacy being promotion by the Communist Party USA, please see the links below to my original posts. I wrote my first post about Mark Ritchie in September 2005, and I have since...

ABSTRACT: The still-undecided Senate election in Minnesota appeared to be entering the home stretch on Friday, hinging on perhaps 1,500 absentee ballots that were rejected by local precinct officials and might be tallied by late next week. “Our aim is to complete the process by the end of the day on the 19th,” Mark Ritchie(1), the Minnesota secretary of state, said after the state’s Canvassing Board formally asked the 87 counties in Minnesota to recheck all rejected absentee ballots for errors. But the bitterly fought recount process had apparently returned to the status quo. Lawyers for Mr. Coleman, who led...

Republicans Fear Al Franken Stealing Votes Sunday, November 9, 2008 8:03 PM By: Phil Brennan With votes for comedian Al Franken mysteriously appearing out of thin air, steadily narrowing the gap between him and Sen. Norm Coleman, the stench of corruption becomes more and more pungent. *Snip* According to the Coleman forces, the ballots were not counted on Election Day and were not kept in sealed boxes. It says the request was made amid "increasing questions about unexplained and improbable shifts in vote counts." The most recent vote tally has Coleman leading Franken by only a couple hundred votes. A...

ST. PAUL, Minn. - Minnesota's U.S. Senate showdown is veering down a path toward the courts and possibly the Senate itself after a panel's ruling on rejected absentee ballots dealt a blow to Democrat Al Franken's chances. For the first time, his campaign on Wednesday openly discussed mounting challenges after the hand recount involving Franken and Republican Sen. Norm Coleman concludes. That includes the possibility of drawing the Senate into the fracas. The state Canvassing Board denied Franken's request to factor absentee ballots rejected by poll workers into the recount. He sought to overturn the exclusions in cases where ballots...

You'd think Democrats would be content with last week's electoral rout. But judging from the odd doings in Minnesota, some in their party wouldn't mind adding to their jackpot by stealing a Senate seat for left-wing joker Al Franken. AP Al Franken. When Minnesotans woke up last Wednesday, Republican Senator Norm Coleman led Mr. Franken by 725 votes. By that evening, he was ahead by only 477. As of yesterday, Mr. Coleman's margin stood at 206. This lopsided bleeding of Republican votes is passing strange considering that the official recount hasn't even begun. The vanishing Coleman vote came during a...

As Democrats nationwide try to make the climb to a filibuster-proof 60 seats in the Senate by pursuing recounts, an outspoken ACORN ally presides over the tallying of votes in the still-unresolved Minnesota Senate race. The fact that Mark Ritchie, a Democrat and former community organizer, largely controls the electoral process in the Land of 10,000 Lakes may be important. That's because at press time incumbent Republican Norm Coleman led Democrat Al Franken by just 341 votes and the Democrats controlled 57 seats in the Senate, compared to the Republicans' 40. The Senate races in Alaska and Georgia also have...

Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman is now just over 220 votes ahead of Democrat Al Franken in the race for the final available senate seat in America. While it would be easy to say, “Well Coleman didn’t vote for this bill or that bill, let him go” this is defeatist, suicidal and sets back our fight to rebuild our conservative movement. Coleman has a lifetime 73% American Conservative Union rating, substantially larger than the voters of Minnesota, but not the American people deserve. Minnesota’s other senator, Amy Klobucher shows us what Franken would be like. Klobucher’s lifetime American Conservative Union rating...

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — An Associated Press analysis of votes in the tight, still-to-be decided race for a U.S. Senate seat in Minnesota shows that most ballots lacking a recorded choice in the election were cast in counties won by Democrat Barack Obama. The finding could have implications for Republican Sen. Norm Coleman and Democrat Al Franken, who are headed for a recount separated by the thinnest of margins — a couple of hundred votes, or about 0.01 percent. About 25,000 ballots statewide carried votes for president but not for the Senate race. Although some voters might have intentionally...