Minnesota Senate Update
The canvassing board in Minnesota met today and made a few decisions.
1. It looks like they will be including the 133 votes per the count on Election Day so that is +46 for Franken
2. They also recommended that most or all of the rejected absentee ballots be reviewed and/or counted but left the decision to each county. Some would argue that this benefits Franken on the theory that his voters are newer and thus more likely to make mistakes.
But it could be countered that such voters were also more likely to vote at the polls on Election Day rather than vote absentee. In adddition if the theory that urban voters are more likely to make mistakes is true then the election officials in those areas would be more experienced at reviewing such ballots and less likely to reject them.
A third argument would be that the rejected ballots are likely to work out the same as the rest of the ballots cast so it wouldn’t really favor either side.
We will have to see what happens.
Info here
Cartoon by RJ Matson, Roll Call
4 Responses to “Minnesota Senate Update”
The real question is will anyone besides Minnesotans even care about this by the time a decision is reached? Neither one of these guys is any prize.
I have to agree with the canvassing board here. Whichever way the recount goes, it's just wrong for someone to have their vote thrown out due to “clerical error”. Had I properly marked my ballot (which I do) and had it tossed, I'd be livid. Count every vote.
Well said kritt. A good friend of mine from college lives in the Twin Cities and we've discussed this a bit. His general sense is that folks up there pretty much hate both sides. You don't seem to find anyone who is willing to say anything positive about either one of the candidates, and any kind of debate centers around which of the two candidates is more evil.
Granted, he's only one person in the state and his observations are general, but you don't really see anyone up there cheering for either side, except for the lawyers. This race lost a lot of luster once the 60-vote threshold for the Dems was lost. If the Dems had 59 senate seats now, then I bet we'd all be looking at the MN race a lot more closely.
The case is now headed to the state Supreme Court as the Coleman campaign wants a statewide standard to be set for how the ballots are counted.
This I think is a reasonable position, you can't have partisan election officials deciding to accept ballots for their guy and deny them for the other guy. You need one set of rules for everyone to make it fair.