During her speech at the Iowa-based Family Leader on Friday, potential presidential candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann made a bold claim before the gathering of social conservatives: Sen. Al Franken, she said, stole the election against Sen. Norm Coleman, and that election is to blame for the passage of the national healthcare reform law.

Bachmann spoke of taking the Triple Crown in 2012 — Republicans taking the House, Senate and White House — and getting to 60 Republican votes in the Senate. (Public Policy Polling, releasing a new survey Thursday [pdf], questioned that possibility, noting “strong movement back toward the Democrats right now” among the public and adding that “it’s entirely possible Democrats could take control of the House back next year.”)

“What do you get when you get to 60 seats in the Senate? You are filibuster-proof. You can pass anything you want,” she said. “That’s why an election was stolen in Minnesota, and yes, I will tell you, it was stolen.”

She continued, “And Al Franken became the 60th Senator to give Barack Obama a filibuster-proof majority in the United States Senate and that’s how we got ‘Obamacare.’”

She said, “But for that stolen election, we wouldn’t have ‘Obamacare’ today. That’s how important every vote is.”

Bachmann didn’t elaborate on how she thought the election was stolen.

Election watchers on both sides of the aisle have dismissed claims and conspiracy theories that the election was stolen.

“These numbers present a roadmap for a Franken challenge,” University of Minnesota political science professor Larry Jacobs told the AP. “It suggests there are about 10,000 votes in the largest Democratic counties that are potentially going to tilt in Franken’s direction.”

The report also said that 18,000 of those ballots were in counties that went for Democrat Barack Obama for president, but the report doesn’t mention a significant number of split-ticket voters in this election, with voters supporting Franken’s opponents, Republican Norm Coleman or independent Dean Barkley, as well as Obama on the same ballot.

The margin between Coleman and Franken currently has a shrinking Coleman lead of 221 votes, well within the margin to trigger an automatic recount. A hand recount would spot ballots where voters indicated support for a Senate candidate, but did not fill in the oval clearly enough for the machine to register the vote or where the machine malfunctioned (See MnIndy’s report on potential scanning machine malfunctions). It’s also possible that voters intentionally skipped voting for a Senate candidate, as the scanners do not refuse to register a ballot with questions left blank, only ballots that contain overvotes.