Friday afternoon as Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie was lauding the work of the State Canvassing Board…
We just finished a very successful week. … It feels great. … The nation can heal from the mess in
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It can’t be coincidence that the Al Franken for Senate campaign pledged today to reduce its pending ballot challenges in the ongoing statewide Senate recount to fewer than 500 by Tuesday. On Friday, Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie…
Minneapolis Precinct 1, Ward 3 is now the latest and greatest Ground Zero of messed-up election practices to be exposed during Minnesota’s statewide recount in the U.S. Senate contest between Democrat Al Franken and Republican incumbent Norm Coleman. It’s there, in the Dinkytown neighborhood on the edge of the University of Minnesota campus, that poll workers recorded 133 more votes than they have ballots to show for it. It’s also there that students trying to vote via Minnesota’s same-day registration process last month were turned away — in a re-run of a major snafu at another campus polling place during the last general election two years ago.
Eighty-eight big name environmental and food activists — including Omnivore’s Dilemma author Michael Pollan, famed restaurant owner Alice Waters and Minnesotan Winona LaDuke — have written to President-elect Barack Obama urging him to appoint America’s first “sustainability Secretary of Agriculture.” And among their list of six candidates they include Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, a former employee of Minnesota’s ag department and co-founder of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.
The main story so far in Minnesota’s statewide election recount — besides incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman’s continuing slim lead over Democratic challenger Al Franken and the role of wrongly rejected absentee ballots — has been how the unexpectedly large numbers of ballot challenges from both campaigns have affected the recount’s running vote tally. By questioning election officials on 27 of every 10,000 ballots cast for either man, the campaigns have temporarily removed nearly 6,000 votes from the official recount totals, leaving Coleman in command (for the moment) of a 344-vote advantage. But take one statistic from Monday’s recount action — Coleman challenged 35 more ballots than did Franken — and extrapolate it across eight days of a recount that’s now nine-tenths done, and you can show, on paper at least, how Coleman’s ballot-challenge lead could account for his lead in the running tally of overall votes.
The twin stacks of recounted ballots for Al Franken and Norm Coleman, each nearing a million votes in height Tuesday night, are like the mattresses piled high in the fable “The Princess and the Pea.” Franken has 976,187 to Coleman’s 978,751 — only a 0.0011 percent difference out of the total 2,354,080 recounted so far, according to official figures. In Hans Christian Andersen’s story, the princess’s sleeplessness at night and bruises by morning — all from a tiny pea many mattresses below her — are proof of her royalty. In Minnesota’s recount story, neither man rests well, tossing and turning because at the bottom of each pile lies a growing bundle of the other man’s challenged ballots.
Forget the comparisons to Florida. Think the Great Pyramids instead.
Minnesota’s U.S. Senate recount is so refined, so elegant, so perfect that even its greatest excess — the unbridled, tit-for-tat ballot-challenges by both the Al Franken and Norm…
The Al Franken for Senate campaign is asking Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie to instruct all counties to redouble their efforts to find missing ballots. “There are votes in Minnesota that aren’t even being accounted for, much less being counted,” spokesman Andy Barr told reporters at a press conference at Franken headquarters in St. Paul this afternoon.
Video and more after the jump.
What seemed a far-fetched math geek dream only hours ago came true tonight: On Day Three of Minnesota’s U.S. Senate recount, the Al Franken and Norm Coleman campaigns again increased the number of challenged ballots by more than 40 percent over the previous day, to 1,525. That number dwarves by a factor of 13 the current 115-vote gap between Franken and Coleman, and suggests the challenged-ballot count will continue to grow exponentially, as MnIndy predicted Friday morning.
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