Funny Business in Minnesota

[stephanie]

our elections have become a joke..


Strange things keep happening in Minnesota, where the disputed recount in the Senate race between Norm Coleman and Al Franken may be nearing a dubious outcome. Thanks to the machinations of Democratic Secretary of State Mark Ritchie and a meek state Canvassing Board, Mr. Franken may emerge as an illegitimate victor.


APMr. 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.


read it all..
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123111967642552909.html

[namvet]

he's all but in. first a movie star and now a funny guy

Minn. Board to Certify Al Franken as Apparent Senate Winner

link (link)

He first became famous as a writer and a performer for Saturday Night Live. and we also have one coming into the white house.............:coffee:

[red states rule]

Here is how Al may win the MN

The point I found the most telling about a Dem recount is

"25 precincts now have more ballots than voters "

nuff said



Funny Business in Minnesota
In which every dubious ruling seems to help Al Franken.


snip

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.

This disenfranchises Minnesotans whose vote counted only once. And one Canvassing Board member, State Supreme Court Justice G. Barry Anderson, has acknowledged that "very likely there was a double counting." Yet the board insists that it lacks the authority to question local officials and it is merely adding the inflated numbers to the totals.

In other cases, the board has been flagrantly inconsistent. Last month, Mr. Franken's campaign charged that one Hennepin County (Minneapolis) precinct had "lost" 133 votes, since the hand recount showed fewer ballots than machine votes recorded on Election Night. Though there is no proof to this missing vote charge -- officials may have accidentally run the ballots through the machine twice on Election Night -- the Canvassing Board chose to go with the Election Night total, rather than the actual number of ballots in the recount. That decision gave Mr. Franken a gain of 46 votes.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123111967642552909.html

[KitchenKitten99]

Franken can't tell jokes... he is a joke.

Come on Minnesota... do we really want THIS representing us?:
http://frontier.cincinnati.com/blogs/gov/uploaded_images/franken-794120.bmp

[red states rule]

"…precincts now have more ballots than voters who signed in to vote."

Establishing a new standard on how Democrats can get out the vote.

[Little-Acorn]

No big deal. If the Democrats hadn't "found" those extra votes, they'd have "found" something else.

Face it, as soon as Franken's original vote count turned out within a thousand of Coleman's, he was guaranteed the seat. The exact mechanism used to get it to him, is unimportant.


....[in one precinct] the Canvassing Board chose to go with the Election Night total, rather than the actual number of ballots in the recount.

I've seen several football games in which close calls were challenged, the refs looked at the replays, and in some cases reversed the calls. If my team is playing, can I now demand that if the original call favored my team, but the refs' decision after replay favored the other team, that the original call be used as the "official" result?

[Abbey Marie]

Threads merged...

[red states rule]

Threads merged...

Sorry about that Abbey

"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."


I wonder how that could have happened? It is so obvious, just for that very reason, that the vote count is wrong and Franken is not the Senator from Minnesota. It is the Democrats that are calling him the winner and they are the ones that want to stop the process and seat him.