The Minnesota Recount results are officially in, and they favor Al Franken to the tune of 225 votes. You may recall at the beginning of the legally-mandated process (a requirement when the margin is within 1% of the population if I recall correctly) many convervatives called for Franken to concede, on the grounds that a long legally-mandated recount would hurt Minnesota. I wonder how they feel about this?
"Given our campaign’s unwavering commitment to ensuring that the vote of no Minnesotan is disenfranchised, today’s ruling by the Minnesota Supreme Court is both disappointing and disheartening,” Knaak said in a statement.I'm going to take a stab that NOW, conservatives will say further challenges to the result are the only way to ensure the people of Minnesota are served. For my part, it looks like there is a new Senator in Minnesota, and you can call him Al.
He also said: “Today’s ruling...ensures that an election contest is now inevitable. The Coleman campaign has consistently and continually fought to have every validly cast vote counted, and for the integrity of Minnesota’s election system, we will not stop now.”
Such a legal showdown could take weeks to resolve. In addition to the Coleman campaign’s request to have the absentee ballots reconsidered, a lawsuit also include claims by Coleman that some votes in Democratic-leaning areas were counted twice.
7 comments:
Not that you'll actually read the whole thing, but...
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123111967642552909.html
"Mr. Franken started the recount 215 votes behind Senator Coleman, but he now claims a 225-vote lead and suddenly the man who was insisting on "counting every vote" wants to shut the process down. He's getting help from Mr. Ritchie and his four fellow Canvassing Board members, who have delivered inconsistent rulings and are ignoring glaring problems with the tallies.
Under Minnesota law, election officials are required to make a duplicate ballot if the original is damaged during Election Night counting. Officials are supposed to mark these as "duplicate" and segregate the original ballots. But it appears some officials may have failed to mark ballots as duplicates, which are now being counted in addition to the originals. This helps explain why more than 25 precincts now have more ballots than voters who signed in to vote. By some estimates this double counting has yielded Mr. Franken an additional 80 to 100 votes."
More votes than voters in more than 25 precints.
Do you think the recount has been fair, Piker?
Or to ask another way, if it was Coleman in the lead, would you still feel the same way, based on the glaring irregularities out there?
The best solution should be a run-off between the two, don't you agree?
I'm getting my facts from an article, you're getting yours from an editorial in the Murdoch-owned Journal. Nate Silver took the trouble earlier to debunk the WSJ piece. Not that you'll take the the trouble to read THAT.
Perhaps you should have provided a link to the Silver post, no?
By the way, does Silver lean to one side, or not?
He's a blogger, just like you and me. He's not a journalist, not a commentor, a blogger.
His "debunking" carries no more weight than yours or mine does.
I also notice that you chose not to answer the questions I asked.
Any reason why?
I should have obliged earlier: Here's the link.
To answer your questions:
1. The recount board has equal members of both parties running things, plus lawyers on both sides to vet and challenge the results. It's fair.
2. Given the board and the process, I'd agree with their decision even if Franken had remained the loser.
3. A runoff would be the worst possible solution: expensive, and assuming the results were as close the second time, even more time-consuming. Go sell crazy somewhere else. We're all full up here.
And to catch up, Nate Silver may be rooting for the left, but he's obsessive-compulsive about poll numbers and probability statistics, and I think his debunking carries a LOT more weight than yours or mine, which is why I'm citing him. If you read all the posts on this debacle, you'll find that early on he saw little chance for Franken. Its only as the numbers turned that he started to talk cautiously about a possible victory; and even today he's not saying it's a done deal and that Coleman still has a chance to prevail.
Gosh, I guess that since Nate Silver said so, it must be true. After all, his profession is journalism. Or is he a lawyer in Minnesota?
I keep forgetting that everything Republicans do is wrong, and everything Democrats do is right.
What the hell kind of response is that? Dispute me on my arguments, not my attitude.
By the way, Nate isn't always right. He underestimated Obama's popular vote by a half-percent.
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