Al Franken and his Democrats are 90% complete with stealing this seat, but its not quite over, yet:
…after the recount and panel-findings, the 312-vote margin separating the two men equals about .01% of the 2.9 million votes cast. Even without any irregularities, this is as close to a “tie” as it gets. And there have been plenty of irregularities. By the end of the recount, the state was awash with evidence of duplicate ballot counting, newly discovered ballots, missing ballots, illegal voting, and wildly diverse standards as to which votes were counted. Any one of these issues was enough to throw the outcome into doubt. Combined, they created a taint more worthy of New Jersey than Minnesota.
The Coleman camp pushed for resolution of these problems during the recount, but it was stymied by a state canvassing board that cared more about preserving its “Minnesota nice” reputation than about making tough calls. The state Supreme Court also punted difficult questions. The mess then landed with the three-judge panel overseeing Mr. Coleman’s contest trial, a panel that seemed out of its depth.
Case in point: the panel’s dismal handling of absentee ballots. Early in the recount, the Franken team howled that some absentee votes had been erroneously rejected by local officials. We warned at the time that this was dangerous territory, designed to pressure election officials into accepting rejected ballots after the fact.
Yet instead of shutting this Franken request down, or early on issuing a clear set of rules as to which absentees were valid, the state Supreme Court and the canvassing board oversaw a haphazard process by which some counties submitted new batches to be included in the tally, while other counties did not. The resulting additional 933 ballots were largely responsible for Mr. Franken’s narrow lead.
In the end, I expect that Franken will get the seat – Minnesota is a pretty Democrat-heavy State and thus the State Supreme Court is almost certain to have a majority in favor of the Democrat winning, come what may (in long research into politics one of the few absolutes is the certainty that any leading Democrat will be primarily motivated by increasing Democrat power). The fact that Fraken – a nasty, bitter partisan who claims we GOPers are relentlessly dishonest – will likely win by cheating is just one of those ironic things…of course the irony will be lost on Democrat rank-and-file who were easily convinced that Gore’s attempt to steal Florida was an attempt by Bush to steal what he already had.
Democrats get away with this sort of thing because the MSM is friendly to them (and thus won’t expose them for the election cheats they are) and because Democrats are relentless and brazen…if they’ve got a close race, they’ll never really quit and if they have to manufacture votes in extremely absurd ways, they’ll just go right on and do it, feeling no shame at all. What this points out is that once we GOPers do regain national power, we will have to force through a modification of the Voting Rights Act to require, at least for Federal office, that those who vote prove they are eligible to vote as well as enacting very severe penalties (we’re talking at least 20 year sentences) for anyone who in any way, shape or form (ACORN, we’re looking at you) in putting fraudulent voters and votes into the electorate.
The only way democracy can work is for the voters to feel reasonably certain that the vote is fair – Democrats have a long and exceptionally dishonorable history of ballot box stuffing but of late it has become worse than ever, and the very foundations of our republic are being shaken…merely in order to allow an extra Democrat or two to hold office. We can’t shame them into stopping (might as well try to shame a whore about dressing like a slut), so we must bring the hammer of the law to bear on them.
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