Posted by
Always To The Right on Friday, January 30, 2009 8:11:13 PM
The mantra from 2000's presidential recount doesn't seem to apply to
the 2008 Minnesota Senate race. As the GOP incumbent pursues his court
challenge, Democrats want the game called due to leading.
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In an appearance with Franken, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid
harrumphed: "The race in Minnesota is over with. . . . There's no way
the election results are going to change." Not if he can help it.
Despite Sen. Reid's objections, Minnesota law allows Coleman to
plead his case before a panel of three state judges. They will decide
whether all legally cast ballots indeed have been counted or in some
cases double-counted in giving Franken a 225-vote lead out of 2.8
million votes cast.
In 25 Minnesota precincts there were more ballots counted than
voters who voted. Election officials had made copies of damaged ballots
but then didn't mark them as copies or sequester them from the
originals. There's also the issue of 133 missing ballots from a heavily
Democratic Minneapolis precinct that were nevertheless included in the
recount.
But there are some 11,000 ballots still not included. Minnesota law
says a ballot can be rejected if the name and address on the ballot do
not match a name and address on the voter rolls, the signature on the
envelope doesn't match the voter's signature on file, the voter was not
registered when he or she voted, or the voter also voted on Election
Day.
Coleman argues that a fair number of such ballots were rejected
because of perceived signature mismatches. Matching signatures is not
an exact science to the untrained eye of a volunteer election judge.
The Democrats say no further review is required — they're in the lead,
so game over.