PresidentChirac wrote:

The same liberal lunatics that elected a muslim will elect a communist ass hole like Al Franken.

Sen. Norm Coleman's narrow lead over DFL challenger Al Franken in the U.S. Senate race narrowed even more, guaranteeing a recount that would be the state's biggest ever and could stretch well into next month.

By KEVIN DUCHSCHERE, CURT BROWN and PAM LOUWAGIE, Star Tribune staff writers

Last update: November 6, 2008 - 10:56 AM

Sen. Norm Coleman's narrow lead over DFL challenger Al Franken in the U.S. Senate race narrowed even more Wednesday, guaranteeing a recount that would be the state's biggest ever and could stretch well into next month.

Coleman declared victory Wednesday morning, when his unofficial lead over Franken stood at 725 votes out of nearly 2.9 million cast, according to the secretary of state's tally. By the end of the day, as county officials from around the state forwarded adjusted figures to the state, that margin had shrunk to 477 votes.

Early Wednesday, Franken announced his support for a recount, which would be automatic because of the closeness of the vote. He said that his campaign was investigating alleged voting irregularities at some polling places in Minneapolis and that "a recount could change the outcome significantly."

"Let me be clear: Our goal is to ensure that every vote is properly counted," he said.

The standoff promised to throw the already long and bitterly contested race into overtime, where the main players will be canvassers and lawyers. The recount involves examining every ballot by hand.

Recounts are required in races with a winning margin of less than one-half of 1 percent, although a losing candidate may request that it not go forward. Coleman and Franken each received 42 percent of the vote, and Independence Party candidate Dean Barkley got 15 percent.

A few hours after Franken spoke, Coleman went before relatives, friends and supporters at his campaign headquarters in St. Paul to say he was "humbled and grateful for the victory that the voters gave us last night." His campaign website flashed the word "VICTORY."

Coleman urged Franken to waive his right to a recount, saying that the prospect of changing the result was remote and that a recount would be costly to taxpayers (about $86,000).

"I just think the need for the healing process is so important. ... hopefully, you don't have TV ads during an election recount," Coleman said.

www.startribune.com . . .

Minnesota ruling favors Franken as recount looms

ST. PAUL, Minn. – Sen. Norm Coleman has failed in an attempt to block some absentee ballots from being counted in his close race with Democrat Al Franken.

A Ramsey County judge on Saturday denied the request because of lack of jurisdiction. The incumbent Republican had tried to block 32 ballots from heavily Democratic Hennepin County.

Coleman's campaign says the ballots were not counted on Election Day or were not kept in sealed boxes. It says the request was made amid "increasing questions about unexplained and improbable shifts in vote counts."

The most recent vote tally has Coleman leading Franken by only a couple hundred votes. A recount is planned.

news.yahoo.com . . .

Chances are that this is gonna be a Coleman (R) win... but we should wait for the recount until it becomes official

FrenchAreToast wrote:


Their strategy is to keep counting and recounting and fudging the vote until they get a lead and then demand that the count stop.

You people do not deserve Al Franken

Al Franken's Election Numbers Keep Changing, Why? November 14, 2008
Can someone figure this out?
A Changed Election?
CFIF.org

Comedian turned Democratic politician Al Franken had little to laugh about on Election night. By dawn the next morning -- after all of the votes were supposedly counted in his race against Republican Norm Coleman for one of Minnesota's U.S. Senate seats -- the returns showed that Franken had lost narrowly by just 725 votes.

Coleman's slim margin of victory meant that there will be an automatic statewide recount. But that's the part of this story yet to come. The recount hasn't even begun -- and won't until later next week -- nevertheless Franken has already closed the gap convincingly.

Indeed, Franken must be more than amused now because, in the week following the election, Senator Coleman's initial lead has all but evaporated -- without any significant stashes of uncounted ballots being uncovered or rejected votes being tallied.

By the night after the election, Franken's deficit had shrunk by more than a third, so that only 477 votes separated the comic from being able to dazzle C-SPAN audiences by delivering his standup routine from the floor of the U.S. Senate. A day later, Coleman's lead took another hit, meaning that it now amounted to less than half the initial margin, down to 336 votes. Last Friday turned the tables nearly another hundred votes, so that Franken then trailed by just 239 votes. The weekend and a government holiday didn't stop the change.

By late Sunday night, another 18 votes were shaved off, lowering Coleman's margin of, by then, less-than-apparent victory to 221. Several days later, on Veteran's Day, Franken had closed the gap even further so that only 206 votes separated him from inauguration day.

All of this has been especially puzzling to election observers because, as previously noted, Franken hasn't yet been the beneficiary of a recount that finds large numbers of previously uncounted votes or that tallies significant figures from earlier machine-rejected ballots. Rather, as University of Maryland research scholar John Lott Jr. wrote in a column that appeared Monday, Franken's fortunes have risen as "local election officials correct[ed] claimed typos in how the numbers were reported."

That has raised an awful lot of questions about what is adding up to be all but the margin of victory.

You see, "[c]orrections were posted in other races, but they were only a fraction of those for the Senate," Lott explained. "The Senate gains for Franken were 2.5 times the gain for Obama in the presidential race count, 2.9 times the total gain that Democrats got across all Minnesota congressional races, and 5 times the net loss that Democrats suffered for all state [h]ouse races."

Indeed, the 500-plus vote swing in favor of Franken "is greater than adding together all the changes for all the precincts in the entire state for the presidential, congressional, and state house races combined (a sum of 482)," Lott noted.

Raising even more questions, "[v]irtually all of Franken's new votes came in just three out of 4130 precincts, and almost half the gain (246 votes) occurred in just one precinct -- Two Harbors, a small town north of Duluth along Lake Superior," Lott explained. "None of the other races had any changes in their vote totals in that precinct," he added.

All of this led Lott to observe that, while the "Minneapolis Star Tribune attributed these types of [reporting] mistakes to ‘exhausted county officials,' ... the sizes of the errors in these three precincts are surprisingly large."

On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal's editorial page escalated the questions that naturally arise from what everyone has seen over the last week in Minnesota.

"[I]t isn't unusual for officials to report that they transposed a number here or there," the Journal acknowledged. But "[i]n a normal audit, these mistakes could be expected to cut both ways," the editorial continued. "Instead, nearly every ‘fix' has gone for Mr. Franken, in some cases under strange circumstances."

Which brings us, finally, to the recount that will begin next week.

The conclusion of the Journal editorial was an admonition that, "[i]f Minnesota wants to retain its reputation as a state with clean elections, it needs to run an honest recount." That really should be straightforward because, as Lott pointed out, recounting the Minnesota vote in 2008 won't be like recounting the Florida vote in 2000.

Unlike the punchcards used by Florida eight years ago, Minnesotans cast their votes using optical scan ballots. This is significant because optical scan machines have some vote-proofing qualities that ensure against mistakenly cast undervotes or overvotes.

"Voters themselves insert[ed] their ballots into the machine that reads and records their votes, and if the machine finds that a vote isn't recorded, voters can either mark the race that they forgot to mark or didn't mark clearly," Lott explained. "Or if voters ‘overvoted' and accidentally marked too many candidates, voters can also get a fresh ballot. There should be no role to divine voters' intentions. If a voter wanted a vote recorded for a particular race, the machine tells him whether his vote in all the races was counted."

In other words, the Minnesota recount of 2008 needn't look anything like the Florida recount of 2000. Judges shouldn't be examining ballots to guess whether the voter had attempted to vote for Franken, and lawyers shouldn't be arguing that rejected ballots should be counted based on such mixed signals. The optical scan machines already gave the voters that second chance, which the voter didn't take if the ballot got cast anyway.

This isn't to say anyone thinks the recount won't devolve into such machinations.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune ran a headline Tuesday noting that both candidates were "[g]etting all lawyered up for [the] Senate recount." After all, since election officials have already corrected away more than two-thirds of Coleman's initial margin of victory, it has become a lot more believable to Franken that he can finish changing the election results so long as he tries.

www.rightsidenews.com . . .

Prophet wrote:

he better fucking not or I'm all cashed out!

If franken wins I'm going to dispute the previous contract on the grounds that voter fraud got him elected there by making the results null and void!

EnglishCanadian wrote:

You people do not deserve Al Franken.......



www.fuckfrance.com . . .

PissNVinegar wrote:



There goes America, land of the free.

Will Al Franken win the senate race in MN?

Al Franken gets boosts in Minnesota Senate recount

The Associated Press

Sun, Dec 14, 2008 (12:03 a.m.)

www.lasvegassun.com . . .

Democrat Al Franken won a pair of victories Friday before the state board overseeing the Senate recount, including a decision that as many as 1,500 incorrectly rejected absentee ballots should be included.

The board also opted to recommend use of election night results in a Franken-leaning Minneapolis precinct where 133 ballots went missing, a decision that could have cost him 46 votes if it had gone the other way.

"It was a great day for democracy," Franken attorney Marc Elias said after a hearing that drew protesters urging use of rejected absentee votes.

Franken had fought especially hard to include the absentees as he tries to overtake Republican Sen. Norm Coleman in the drawn-out recount.

Coleman's campaign lawyers said they would go to court over the absentee ballot ruling.

With all precincts recounted, Coleman has a 188-vote edge over Franken _ down slightly from his 215-vote lead entering the recount.

But there's a long way to go. That margin doesn't include the absentees. Nor does it include any of the 6,655 ballot challenges the two campaigns filed during the recount. Both sides have withdrawn hundreds _ including 750 Friday by Franken _ but the state Canvassing Board will tackle some 3,450 starting Tuesday.

The board's decision on improperly rejected absentees doesn't guarantee they will be opened and counted because it doesn't have the power to order counties to do so. Most counties have gone forward with a voluntary sorting, though others have balked.

But Secretary of State Mark Ritchie said he's not worried about getting counties aboard.

"They are sobered, and they would like to correct those errors," he said.

Coleman's campaign planned to file a petition with the state Supreme Court as soon as Friday to seek uniform rules for dealing with the absentee ballots, arguing that leaving the task to counties would create inconsistencies.

Coleman lawyer Tony Trimble said the campaign is asking counties to hold off any action involving the ballots until the court weighs in.

Elias, Franken's attorney, called the move desperate and cynical.

"The cold reality of where they stand in this count is upon them, and they are desperate to do something to keep these ballots from being counted," he said.

At least 638 absentee ballots are known to have been rejected for something other than the four legal reasons for disqualification. That's based on an assessment of about half of Minnesota's counties by the secretary of state's office. State officials estimate the total could top 1,500.

It's not known which candidate stands to benefit most from those ballots.

"It would be unjust and disrespectful to those voters not to count those votes," said Judge Edward Cleary, one of four who sit with Ritchie on the board.

About 30 demonstrators gathered outside the Capitol hearing room to urge Canvassing Board members to count the absentee ballots. They held handmade signs saying "Let the people's votes count" and "Count every vote." Some wore "Count every vote" stickers.

The board acted after receiving a legal opinion from the office of Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson, a Democrat, that the ballots should be counted.

"There is no doubt that voters who have complied with all legal requirements, but whose ballots were improperly rejected, should have their vote counted," it read.

The opinion laid out several options for getting the ballots into the count, some involving court action and others through administrative means. It says that the campaigns are free to seek court orders to compel counties to take part.

The board voted unanimously to rely on tapes from a ballot counting machine rather than results from the manual recount in a precinct in the University of Minnesota area in Minneapolis. Coleman's campaign had argued against using anything but the recount figures.

A packet of ballots from the precinct couldn't be found after an exhaustive search of the city's elections warehouse. Consequently, the recount showed 133 fewer votes than the number of people who signed in on Election Day or who voted absentee.

Because Franken decisively won the precinct, he stood to lose the most votes if the board went with the recount tally over the machine tapes.

___

Associated Press writer Martiga Lohn contributed to this report.