With the votes all counted, Republican Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota won his reelection bid against the ultra-liberal, humorless Al Franken, but the race isn’t over yet. Since the margin is only a few hundred votes, a mandatory recount is next.
But now newly-found additional votes and revisions of already counted votes are coming in to the state’s election official, reported to be a left-wing Democrat associated with ACORN. And guess what – all the new counts benefit Franken.
It’s déjà vu all over again. Older Chicagoans may remember watching Mike Royko on election nights cautioning Illinois Republicans not to get too hopeful when their candidates were narrowly running ahead of Dems in state-wide races because the final vote tallys from the Daley-controlled city “river wards” hadn’t all come in yet and always came in late – implying that the Democratic machine held back submitting counts until they knew how many votes were needed to win. The machine’s only limitation, usually, on the number of Democratic votes they would report was some general notion of the number of adult residents in the ward, living and recently deceased. Well, it seems that Minnesota has some “river” counties.
We’ve seen this recently in 2000 in Florida, and in 2004 in the Washington state governor’s race. The playbook is the same: after official vote counts show the Republican winning by a very narrow margin, previously submitted vote totals are “revised” and new votes are found that had been “overlooked.”
Past Republican surrenders to this assault have been instructive, and no doubt provocative, to some Democrats, who apparently think they can outlast and outmaneuver most Republicans in the inevitable exhaustive court fight. So now Democrats in Minnesota try again, brazenly in slow motion and in broad daylight.
John Michael Greco
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