The Schultz Report: Is Minnesota another Florida 2000? No, and yes

In this week’s edition of the Schultz Report, David Schultz examines the looming vote recount in the Minnesota US Senate face-off between Sen. Norm Coleman and Al Franken.

Is the situation here another Florida 2000 cage match, as so many pundits are claiming? “No,” says Schultz, “in the sense that we don’t face the same problems as Florida on several counts. In Florida, we had clear evidence of a secretary of state, Katherine Harris, engaging in vote suppression and purges of voter lists. We have no evidence of that in Minnesota. The secretary of state is trying to figure out how to count every vote, and to encourage people to vote. Second, unlike Florida, where we had multiple different technologies used across the state to vote, Minnesota pretty much has one technology to vote.

David Schultz

“Third, unlike Florida, when they actually started doing the recount in the four counties — where the Supreme Court entered in, for good or for bad, was when it reacted to the problems we all remember, where you had people in one county counting ballots differently [from another county]. Is a dimpled chad counted? A pregnant chad? What if it had two of its corners torn loose? In that state, you had wide variance across the four recount counties regarding what was considered to be the intent of the voter. That’s where the Supreme Court entered in and said you had to have uniform standards.

“Unlike that problem in Florida, Minnesota has a state law that describes how you ascertain voter intent. And what the law first says is that, if at all possible, the intent of the voter should be ascertained. And more importantly, the law says that technical noncompliance with the law in terms of how you cast your vote should not be an obstacle to counting votes. The law says that even if you don’t follow [ballot rules] to a tee — even if, for example, you circle a name as opposed to filling in a bubble dot — if you can figure out how that person meant to vote, you have to do it. So the law is very different in terms of establishing uniform standards.

“For all those reasons, we’re not Florida. Where we are Florida is in terms of the ideological battle that’s being waged by the Republicans to attack Mark Ritchie and to cast doubts on what’s happening in Minnesota — anywhere from claiming that Mark Ritchie is the new Katherine Harris to claiming that votes are being manufactured. To that extent, Minnesota has become a powerful battleground, like Florida. And additionally, while Florida was the state that decided a presidency, it is possible that, depending on what happens in Alaska and Georgia, Minnesota could be the deciding state to determine whether the Democrats get 60 votes in the US Senate. If they get 60 votes in the Senate, that means they have the votes to break a Republican filibuster. So the stakes are enormous, and from that score we’re potentially another Florida in terms of the high stakes going on.”

Listen: David Schultz discusses the great recount shootout of ’08 (and Michele Bachmann’s last laugh on the bailout bill) (12:48)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.