| Submit your comments on this article |
| Home Front: Politix |
| How to Steal an Election |
| 2009-07-02 |
| This is a good summary of how Franken won his Senate seat The unfortunate lesson is that you don't need to win the vote on Election Day as long as your lawyers are creative enough to have enough new or disqualified ballots counted after the fact. Mr. Franken trailed Mr. Coleman by 725 votes after the initial count on election night, and 215 after the first canvass. The Democrat's strategy from the start was to manipulate the recount in a way that would discover votes that could add to his total. The Franken legal team swarmed the recount, aggressively demanding that votes that had been disqualified be added to his count, while others be denied for Mr. Coleman. But the team's real goldmine were absentee ballots, thousands of which the Franken team claimed had been mistakenly rejected. While Mr. Coleman's lawyers demanded a uniform standard for how counties should re-evaluate these rejected ballots, the Franken team ginned up an additional 1,350 absentees from Franken-leaning counties. By the time this treasure hunt ended, Mr. Franken was 312 votes up, and Mr. Coleman was left to file legal briefs. What Mr. Franken understood was that courts would later be loathe to overrule decisions made by the canvassing board, however arbitrary those decisions were. He was right. If the GOP hopes to avoid repeats, it should learn from Minnesota that modern elections don't end when voters cast their ballots. They only end after the lawyers count them. |
| Posted by:Frozen Al |
| #3 Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything. |
| Posted by: Josef Stalin 2009-07-02 15:19 |
| #2 Gore came close in 2000. Franken must've learned from that and then went on to perfect the method. They'll squeal like stuck pigs if Republicans ever pull this kind of crap. |
| Posted by: Ebbang Uluque6305 2009-07-02 14:02 |
| #1 So they kept counting until they got the result that was desired. Sounds a little like Iran elections...except in Iran they never counted them in the first place, they just announced the results. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2009-07-02 13:17 |