Coleman Brought a Squirt Gun to a Knife Fight In the Minnesota Senate Recount Battle

Well, the Minnesota senate race recount is finally over, and what most people, including me, thought would happen happened. Vicious, no-holds-barred ultra-liberal Democrat Franken out-recounted incumbent Republican gentleman-Norm Coleman. It’s hard to understand even now Coleman’s puzzlingly restrained behavior while the Franken Democrats were stealing the election via a selective recount in Democratic strongholds. Coleman may have thought Minnesota Democrats were above bad behavior, but the joke’s on him, and unfortunately also on us.

This Democratic tactic has been tried twice in the recent past in high profile races – in the 2000 Presidential election, of course, and in the 2004 Washington state governor race. Bush fought hard and finally prevailed, but in Washington state the Republican caved. Coleman seems to have taken an above-it-all approach, counting on the courts to invalidate Franken’s shenanigans, even though such an approach in the Washington governor’s race didn’t work and even though a leading Democratic strategist from that contest was called in early as a Franken advisor.

Coleman won the initial count by over 700 votes, and then also won the first recount by over 200. But as in the Washington governor’s race, that did not deter the Democrats. Votes were selectively “found” in majority Democratic precincts. Democrat Franken’s team seemed to have out-hustled, out-maneuvered, and out-smarted Coleman’s. Franken was recently declared the winner by 312 votes.

Among the many disturbing reports, one from the Wall Street Journal (link) particularly astounded me for the brazenness of the state’s Canvassing Board, led by the ultra-liberal Democrat Secretary of State, who was elected with significant help from the ethically bankrupt left-wing ACORN organization. In one heavily Democratic precinct the hand recount showed fewer votes than had been recorded by the machine on election night, so the Board went with the higher election night count, netting Franken 46 votes. But in another heavily Democratic precinct, the opposite occurred, so the partisan Democrat Board went with the recount, there netting Franken 37 votes. As the WSJ noted, Franken “benefited both ways from the board's inconsistency.”

Another aspect was how local precinct officials decided which “votes” were valid under the law. John Hinderaker at Power Line blog (link) notes:

It turns out, not surprisingly, that the counties that are careful about applying election laws are Republican-leading counties, while the lax ones … are heavily Democratic. What this means, in practice, is that thousands of votes are counted in Democratic counties that would not be counted if the same voter lived in a Republican county…. Thus a deep irony arises: if a uniform standard of strict compliance with the absentee ballot statute is applied, Coleman wins. If a looser standard of substantial compliance with the statute is uniformly applied, Coleman also wins. The only way Coleman loses is if a strict standard is applied in Republican counties and a lax standard is applied in Democratic counties. Unfortunately, that is exactly what has happened so far.

The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board (link) supplies the coda:

Mr. Coleman didn't lose the election. He lost the fight to stop the state canvassing board from changing the vote-counting rules after the fact. This is now the second time [citing the 2004 Washington state governor race] Republicans have been beaten in this kind of legal street fight. If the GOP hopes to avoid repeats, it should learn from Minnesota that modern elections don't end when voters cast their ballots. They only end after the lawyers count them.

John M Greco

Previous posts on this subject:

In Minnesota, If It’s Close, They Will Try to Steal It

Democrats Gaining in Their Attempt To Steal Minnesota Senate Election Via Rigged Recount

Minnesota Canvassing Judge Slams Criticisms of Bias, But Does Not Rebut a Single Allegation of Serious Mischief in the Coleman-Franken Recount

Minnesota Canvassing Judge Slams Criticisms of Bias, But Does Not Rebut a Single Allegation of Serious Mischief in the Coleman-Franken Recount

Investor’s Business Daily [link] has reported that on January 5, 2009, “after a flurry of ballots that materialized after election night, the Minnesota Canvassing Board determined that [Democrat] Al Franken is the duly elected junior senator from the land of 10,000 lakes and almost as many questionable ballots. The margin was 225 votes out of nearly 3 million cast…. Franken is not quite senator yet. Incumbent [Republican] Norm Coleman, who led on election night by more than 700 votes, has filed what is called an election contest. This is a legal proceeding, held before a panel of judges to be appointed by the chief judge of the Supreme Court, to determine the winner of the election.” I have written previously about this election contest here and here.

Specific serious allegations have been made of inconsistent decision making by the Canvassing Board that have favored Democrat Franken and disadvantaged Republican Coleman. Some of these allegations were outlined in a recent Wall Street Journal editorial (link). One member of the Canvassing Board has responded to the Journal’s editorial and his letter was published by the Journal on January 7. He is Edward J. Cleary, Assistant Chief Judge, Second Judicial District, as well as member of the Canvassing Board, who wrote (link):

As a member of the Minnesota State Canvassing Board, appointed pursuant to statute, I have attended all nine board open meetings held in the past seven weeks. I am knowledgeable about the proceedings, as well as Minnesota's election laws…. [A]ll of our major votes were unanimous. We consistently followed the law in limiting our involvement to a nonadjudicative role, declining both candidates' attempts to expand our mandate. Further, we painstakingly reviewed each challenged ballot, some more than once, to confirm that we were ruling in a consistent manner. One can only assume, based on the tone of the editorial, and the over-the-top slam at Al Franken, that had Norm Coleman come out on top in this recount, the members of the board would have been praised as "strong-willed, intelligent and perceptive."

Cleary does not respond to a single specific allegation of possible impropriety made by the Wall Street Journal. Not a single one. Here are three of them:

(1) 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.

(2) 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.

(3) Meanwhile, a Ramsey County precinct ended up with 177 more ballots than there were recorded votes on Election Night. In that case, the board decided to go with the extra ballots, rather than the Election Night total, even though the county is now showing more ballots than voters in the precinct. This gave Mr. Franken a net gain of 37 votes, which means he's benefited both ways from the board's inconsistency.

Cleary, a sitting Minnesota judge who should know about addressing issues when raised, does not respond to a single one of these very serious allegations, not a single one, yet he slams the Journal for “slamming” Democrat Al Franken.

Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute, has written (link):

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. … It’s hard to imagine that Coleman is always wrong and Franken always right. So what is really going on in Minnesota?

The fact remains – specific allegations have been made of inconsistent Canvassing Board decisions that served to favor Democrat Franken. Canvassing Board member Cleary blows smoke but does not even mention let alone rebut a single allegation. This is supposed to assure us that he has been balanced and fair? I remain unconvinced.


John M Greco

Democrats Gaining in Their Attempt To Steal Minnesota Senate Election Via Rigged Recount

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.

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.

Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute ,wrote about this election recount on December 19, 2008, at Bloomberg.com (link):

[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

In Minnesota, If It’s Close, They Will Try to Steal It

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