> Sam wrote:
> Have you read this?
Have you read this:
Did the Wall Street Journal Fire their Fact-Checkers?
The Wall Street Journal is bar none one of the best newspapers in the
country -- except when its Editorial Board is having a bad day. And
today the Board is having a very bad day, having published an
editorial that declares Al Franken's provisional win in Minnesota,
which the state just certified moments ago, to be illegitimate, while
accusing Minnesota's Canvassing Board of being inconsistent and biased
in favor of Franken.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with taking such a position. The
Journal's editorial, however, has several basic facts wrong, makes
several other assertions based on flimsy or nonexistent evidence, and
generally has little understanding of the process that has taken place
to date.
Let's go through the editorial paragraph by paragraph.
Strange things keep happening in Minnesota, where the disputed
recount in the Senate race between Norm Coleman and Al Franken may be
nearing a dubious outcome. Thanks to the machinations of Democratic
Secretary of State Mark Ritchie and a meek state Canvassing Board, Mr.
Franken may emerge as an illegitimate victory
"Machinations": there's a ten-dollar word. Ritchie may be a Democrat,
but he was also democratically elected -- lower case 'D' -- by the
people of Minnesota. And as for the Canvassing Board, it arguably
leans to the right, consisting of two members appointed by Tim
Pawlenty, one appointed by Jesse Ventura, one elected member, and
Ritchie.
Mr. Franken started the recount 215 votes behind Senator Coleman,
but he now claims a 225-vote lead and suddenly the man who was
insisting on "counting every vote" wants to shut the process down.
He's getting help from Mr. Ritchie and his four fellow Canvassing
Board members, who have delivered inconsistent rulings and are
ignoring glaring problems with the tallies.
Actually, Coleman is having far more trouble with the Minnesota
Supreme Court, which generally has a conservative reputation, than he
is with the Canvassing Board. They're the ones who rejected his
petition on duplicate ballots, and they're the ones who rejected his
notion of wanting to tack on additional ballots to the absentee ballot
counting.
Under Minnesota law, election officials are required to make a
duplicate ballot if the original is damaged during Election Night
counting. Officials are supposed to mark these as "duplicate" and
segregate the original ballots. But it appears some officials may have
failed to mark ballots as duplicates, which are now being counted in
addition to the originals. This helps explain why more than 25
precincts now have more ballots than voters who signed in to vote. By
some estimates this double counting has yielded Mr. Franken an
additional 80 to 100 votes.
There are 25 precincts with more ballots than voters? I'm not sure
this is actually true. There were certain precincts with more votes
counted during the recount than there were on Election Night -- which
is not surprising, considering that the whole purpose of a hand
recount is to find votes that the machine scanners missed the first
time around. I have not seen any evidence, on the other hand, that
there are precincts with more votes than voters as recorded on sign-in
sheets. And the Coleman campaign evidently hasn't either, or it
presumably would have presented it to the Court, which rejected its
petition for lack of evidence.
Also, note the weasel-wordy phrase "by some estimates", which
translates as "by the Coleman campaign's estimate". There is no
intrinsic reason why Franken ballots are more likely to be duplicated
than Coleman ballots, especially when one significant source of
duplicate ballots is military absentees, a group that presumably
favors the Republicans. Coleman, indeed, only became interested in the
issue of duplicates once he fell behind in the recount and needed some
way to extend his clock. Before then, his lead attorney had sent an
e-mail to Franken which said that challenges on the issue of duplicate
ballots were "groundless and frivolous".
This disenfranchises Minnesotans whose vote counted only once. And
one Canvassing Board member, State Supreme Court Justice G. Barry
Anderson, has acknowledged that "very likely there was a double
counting." Yet the board insists that it lacks the authority to
question local officials and it is merely adding the inflated numbers
to the totals.
The Canvassing Board indeed determined that it lacked the
jurisidiction to handle duplicate ballots, telling Coleman that he had
to go to court. Which he did. And the court threw the case out because
Coleman didn't have any evidence.
In other cases, the board has been flagrantly inconsistent. Last
month, Mr. Franken's campaign charged that one Hennepin County
(Minneapolis) precinct had "lost" 133 votes, since the hand recount
showed fewer ballots than machine votes recorded on Election Night.
Though there is no proof to this missing vote charge -- officials may
have accidentally run the ballots through the machine twice on
Election Night -- the Canvassing Board chose to go with the Election
Night total, rather than the actual number of ballots in the recount.
That decision gave Mr. Franken a gain of 46 votes.
Actually, there is some proof: the number of votes identified during
the recount fell 134 short of the number of voters who signed in on
Election Night in this precinct.
Meanwhile, a Ramsey County precinct ended up with 177 more ballots
than there were recorded votes on Election Night. In that case, the
board decided to go with the extra ballots, rather than the Election
Night total, even though the county is now showing more ballots than
voters in the precinct. This gave Mr. Franken a net gain of 37 votes,
which means he's benefited both ways from the board's inconsistency.
The decisions are not inconsistent if the Canvassing Board's objective
is wanting to count every vote.
And here again the Journal is going on about the county "showing more
ballots than voters in the precinct". If there is evidence of this, it
would be news not just to me but also to the Coleman campaign.
And then there are the absentee ballots. The Franken campaign
initially howled that some absentee votes had been erroneously
rejected by local officials. Counties were supposed to review their
absentees and create a list of those they believed were mistakenly
rejected. Many Franken-leaning counties did so, submitting 1,350
ballots to include in the results. But many Coleman-leaning counties
have yet to complete a re-examination. Despite this lack of
uniformity, and though the state Supreme Court has yet to rule on a
Coleman request to standardize this absentee review, Mr. Ritchie's
office nonetheless plowed through the incomplete pile of 1,350
absentees this weekend, padding Mr. Franken's edge by a further 176
votes.
This is just blatantly false. All counties, red and blue alike, were
instructed by the Supreme Court to identify any wrongly-rejected
absentee ballots, and all of them did. In certain counties, Coleman
claims to have identified additional wrongly-rejected absentee ballots
above and beyond the ones that county officials identified -- but
these were counties that nevertheless complied with the court's order
and turned in their lists of ballots to the state.
Both campaigns have also suggested that Mr. Ritchie's office made
mistakes in tabulating votes that had been challenged by either of the
campaigns. And the Canvassing Board appears to have applied
inconsistent standards in how it decided some of these challenged
votes -- in ways that, again on net, have favored Mr. Franken.
I watched the video feed of the challenge adjudication process and did
think there were some number of inconsistencies, particularly in the
ways that ballots with 'X's on them were handled. But, I was looking
at .pdfs of the ballots, whereas the Canvassing Board got to look at
full-color, three-dimensional copies, which may make some difference
in borderline cases. More to the point, however: (1) both candidates
had their lawyers in the room when this adjudication was taking place,
and had every right to press the Board on perceived inconsistencies,
and (2) there is no evidence whatsoever that these inconsistencies
hurt any one candidate particularly more than the other.
The question is how the board can certify a fair and accurate
election result given these multiple recount problems. Yet that is
precisely what the five members seem prepared to do when they meet
today. Some members seem to have concluded that because one of the
candidates will challenge the result in any event, why not get on with
it and leave it to the courts? Mr. Coleman will certainly have grounds
to contest the result in court, but he'll be at a disadvantage given
that courts are understandably reluctant to overrule a certified
outcome.
He'll be at a disadvantage because fewer people voted for him.
Meanwhile, Minnesota's other Senator, Amy Klobuchar, is already
saying her fellow Democrats should seat Mr. Franken when the 111th
Congress begins this week if the Canvassing Board certifies him as the
winner. This contradicts Minnesota law, which says the state cannot
award a certificate of election if one party contests the results. Ms.
Klobuchar is trying to create the public perception of a fait
accompli, all the better to make Mr. Coleman look like a sore loser
and build pressure on him to drop his legal challenge despite the
funny recount business.
But it doesn't contradict Congressional precedent, as the Congress
generally has seated provisional winners while challenges were taking
place, including Republican Representative Vern Buchanan in 2007 and
Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu in 1997.
Minnesotans like to think that their state isn't like New Jersey
or Louisiana, and typically it isn't. But we can't recall a similar
recount involving optical scanning machines that has changed so many
votes, and in which nearly every crucial decision worked to the
advantage of the same candidate. The Coleman campaign clearly
misjudged the politics here, and the apparent willingness of a
partisan like Mr. Ritchie to help his preferred candidate, Mr.
Franken. If the Canvassing Board certifies Mr. Franken as the winner
based on the current count, it will be anointing a tainted and
undeserving Senator.
New Jerseyites! Louisianans! Cancel your subscriptions! And the rest
of you might as well too.
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