Lizard People: A meme born in a Minnesota voting booth

MPR’s “Challenged Ballots: You be the judge” post has got to be the site’s top traffic generator ever. I’ve seen it linked locally and nationally, on buttoned-up news sites and Comedy Central’s Indecision ’08. That last one, which references the infamous contested write-in vote for “Lizard People” (destined to be our “Hanging Chad of Aught Eight”), ends with a few salient questions:

Should the county have accepted the Franken vote? Does the voter consider Al Franken equivalent to the Lizard People? Is Lizard People a collective, or just one person like Cat Power? If elected, will the Lizard People rule benignly or will they control us with their forked-tongue tyranny?

Currently MPR is the top hit on a Google search for the term “Lizard People” (followed by “The Best Conspiracy Theories (Lizard-People Are Running the World!“). Whoever these reptilian-Americans are, MPR, Al Franken and Norm Coleman really put them on the map. In fact, according to Google Trends, they weren’t anywhere at all up til now.