Heard beneath Friday’s hubbub over the vote count in Mountain Iron, Minn., was the advancement of a related Republican argument — that by offering reasons why a recount in the U.S. Senate election contest between Democrat Al Franken and Republican U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman should go forward, Democrats are insulting Minnesota’s election system and its election officials.

What was implicit in U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman’s remarks Wednesday, prominent Republican commentator Sarah Janecek made explicit Friday, first by writing that when Democrats say they want to “ensure votes properly cast are properly counted,” they’re really out to “smear our elections process.” Later she told a public television audience, “I’m pretty sickened by that.” In the meantime, Coleman’s campaign manager applied words like “dubious” and “tainted” to the current canvassing process.

In an article for her Politics in Minnesota Weekly Report, publisher Janecek wrote:

The outsider ethos that has plagued Al Franken since the inception of his candidacy two years ago now manifests itself in an even uglier fashion: casting doubt on Minnesota’s election process. … Franken and the DFL Party are not entitled to, at best, cast doubt on our process, or worse, create chaos. The PR and legal strategy appears to hang on “properly cast votes properly counted.”

Here Janecek cites Franken’s and five other DFLers’ use of the offending phrase, “ensure properly cast votes are properly counted.” She continues:

We’ve talked to a number of rank-and-file election judges (from both parties) this week and they feel insulted. These people volunteer their time year after year to do the Good Neighbor thing at the polls. To smear our elections process is to smear them, they believe.

Later Friday Janecek made one of her frequent appearances on TPT’s weekly “Almanac” show, where she said:

I really dread this entire process. Minnesota — highest voter turnout in the nation. We’re known for our clean elections. And you look at the rhetoric that’s coming from the Franken campaign about improper elections, improper votes cast, and it just — I’m sickened. I think in large part — Secretary Ritchie flagged this earlier — we have good people running our elections. So I’m pretty sickened by that.

This on a day when Coleman’s campaign manager, Cullen Sheehan, said in a press release:

Minnesota has a history of fair and clean elections, and we are committed to ensuring that this election is no different. That is why it is so troubling to us that …statistically dubious and improbable shifts … are overwhelmingly accruing to the benefit of Al Franken. And, as many of these unexplained and improbably vote swings are taking place on the Iron Range, we’re asking that local and state election officials provide us with the necessary data to reassure the public that the canvassing process has not been tainted.

If the Democrats’ phrase “ensure votes properly cast are properly counted” is enough to make Republicans ill, then the Coleman camp’s words — “troubling,” “dubious,” “unexplained,” “improbably” and “tainted” — must have pushed them way beyond Minute Clinic-sick.

The question is whether words — whatever their political stripe, emotional pang or medical impact — will distract Minnesotans and their public officials from seeing the electoral system through a professional and impartial recount process.