The recount process continues in the disputed Minnesota Senate election. Democrat Franken and his team are pulling out all the stops in an effort to take the seat from incumbent Republican Norm Coleman. The day before yesterday, the ultra-liberal Huffington Post reported (link) that the canvassing board's final recount gives Franken a 50 vote lead, but with over 1,300 disputed absentee ballots to be dealt with; the post outlines the next steps in the process. Given past history, it would seem the smart money is on the Democrats.In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (link), Trent England details the infamous stealing of the 2004 Washington State election for governor by Democrats, particularly aided by their militant arm ACORN, and comments on the similarities between that event and what’s happening now in Minnesota:
For those who watched the Washington State governor's race recounts in 2004, the ongoing recount drama in Minnesota is just another rehash of the same script…. [I]n Washington, Democratic Party candidate Christine Gregoire lost the first count, lost the recount, and then won a second, highly dubious recount by 133 votes. In Minnesota, where Sen. Norm Coleman is defending his seat against comedian-turned-candidate Al Franken, the first count showed Mr. Coleman up 725 votes. Today, thanks to another dubious recount, Mr. Franken is apparently in the lead.Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute ,wrote about this election recount on December 19, 2008, at Bloomberg.com (link):
Both Mr. Franken and Ms. Gregoire were endorsed by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now -- Acorn -- a group under investigation in several states for suspected voter registration chicanery. The man overseeing the Senate recount, Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, was also endorsed by Acorn, and his election campaign in 2006 was funded in part by something called "The Secretary of State Project." This latter group, founded by MoveOn.org's former grass-roots director, exists solely to install far-left candidates as secretaries of state in swing states.
[A]ny fair-minded person should be concerned about what’s going on in Minnesota. Throughout the recount, the state’s majority Democratic political machine has been grinding away in Franken’s favor. From a dispute over double-counted ballots, to the treatment of rejected absentee forms, Coleman has lost every major dispute with Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, a Democrat, and the state canvassing board, which is controlled by Democrats. Unsympathetic judges have rejected Coleman’s appeals. It’s hard to imagine that Coleman is always wrong and Franken always right. So what is really going on in Minnesota? …. After examining some of the ballots, I’m concerned. Although voter intent seems clear in a large majority of the ballots, in a number of instances the board’s judgments seem inconsistent in a way that favors Franken.Last month in December, Ann Coulter devoted three of her weekly columns to the Minnesota recount. On December 3, 2008, she wrote (link):
On Election Day, Franken lost the U.S. Senate race in Minnesota to the Republican incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman by 725 votes. But over the next week, Democratic counties keep discovering new votes for Franken and subtracting votes from Coleman, claiming to be correcting "typos." In all, Franken picked up 459 votes and Coleman lost 60 votes from these alleged "corrections." As the inestimable economist John Lott [link] pointed out, the "corrections" in the Senate race generated more new votes for Franken than all the votes added by corrections in every race in the entire state -- presidential, congressional, state house, sanitation commissioner and dogcatcher -- combined. And yet the left-wing, George Soros-backed Secretary of State, Mark Ritchie, stoutly defended the statistically impossible "corrected" votes. There's something fishy going on in Minnesota besides the annual bigmouth bass tournament.
To understand what is happening in Minnesota, one must turn to the Washington state gubernatorial election of 2004. As in Minnesota this year, the Republican candidate kept winning and winning, but the Democrats refused to concede, instead demanding endless recounts. Meanwhile, Democratic precincts kept "discovering" new ballots for the Democrat…. The head of the Washington State Democratic Party orchestrating this ballot theft was Paul Berendt. Guess who is advising Al Franken on the Minnesota recount right now? That's right: Paul Berendt.Minnesota has gone to a hand recount, but in some instances election officials are allowing the original election-day results to be recorded instead of hand recount totals when the original results favor Democrat Franken. Coulter wrote on December 10, 2008 (link):
What is the point of having a hand recount of ballots in the Minnesota Senate race if the Democratic secretary of state is going to use the election night totals in precincts where it will benefit Democrat Al Franken? Either the hand recount produces a better, more accurate count, or there was no point to the state spending roughly $100,000 to conduct the hand recount in the first place. But that is exactly what the George Soros-supported secretary of state has agreed to do in the case of a Dinkytown precinct near the University of Minnesota. The hand recount of the liberal precinct produced 133 fewer ballots than the original count on election night and, more important, 46 fewer votes for Franken. So he's proposing to defer to the election night total over the recount tally.
Highly implausible, post-election "corrections" in just three Democratic precincts -- Two Harbors, Mountain Iron and Partridge Township -- cost Coleman 446 votes. But I note that Ritchie doesn't propose deferring to the election night totals there. The Minneapolis Star Tribune attributed the 436-vote "correction" in Franken's favor to "exhausted county officials." Were they more exhausted in those three precincts than in Dinkytown? Either the post-election tally is better than the election night tally or it isn't. Cherry-picking only those election night results Ritchie likes isn't an attempt to get an accurate vote-count; it's an attempt to get a Democrat in the U.S. Senate.
On December 18, 2008, Coulter wrote (link) that “No matter how many times Democrats steal elections, Republicans keep thinking the next time will be different. Minnesota is famously clean, isn't it? It must different. It's not different. It's still the Democrats.”
In a previous post here (link) on November 8, 2008, I wrote about this attempt by Democrats to steal the Minnesota senate election: “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.” In the 2004 Washington state contest for governor, Republican Dino Rossi declined to challenge the stolen election in court, and decided to move on with his life. He then ran again against the now-incumbent governor Democrat Christine Gregoire in 2008 and lost by over 6 percentage points amidst the Obama voter surge. Most Washington state voters either forgot to punish Democrats for their immorality in stealing the 2004 election or they endorsed it.
As we know, weakness is provocative. So now in Minnesota, encouraged by the Washington state experience, Democrats try once again, brazenly in broad daylight, to steal an election. Liberals avert their eyes, thinking that election cheating is a small price to pay to secure another Senate seat for their self-defined morally-superior Democrat party.
First paragraph expanded at 10:44 p.m. on Jan 1.
John M Greco
