Alaska’s Miller accuses GOP incumbent of ‘pulling a Franken’

Photo: Chris Steller, MnIndy

In Alaska’s still undecided GOP Senate primary, the race may be decided by absentee ballots, prompting candidate Joe Miller to invoke the name of Minnesota’s junior senator: “It concerns us any time somebody lawyers up and tries to pull an Al Franken,” he said of incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski. “We are very concerned that there may be some attempt here to skew the results.”

To Franken’s defense comes Salon’s Alex Parene: “In a fact-based world, ‘pull an Al Franken’ would mean ‘win an election by receiving more votes than the other person.’”

Noting that in Minnesota’s protracted Senate recount and contest of 2008 former Sen. Norm Coleman had lawyers too, he continued:

To “pull a Joe Miller,” I submit, is to preemptively plant the germ of the idea that in the event of a candidate losing an election by a small margin after a recount, the election was stolen. By liberals.

According to the Washington Independent’s Jesse Zwick, there are still more than 20,000 absentee ballots to be processed following Alaska’s primary.