Democrats want to declare an end to the Minnesota Senate race, with Al Franken the winner and Norm Coleman the sore loser. In an appearance with Franken last week, Harry Reid averred: “The race in Minnesota is over with. . . . There’s no way the election results are going to change.” This is deeply unfair to both Coleman and the voters of Minnesota.
We weren’t particularly impressed with Coleman’s recount strategy; he was outsmarted and out-hustled by Franken’s lawyers, as they busily went about discovering new Franken votes while Coleman—futilely, it turned out—tried to sit on his narrow lead. Coleman now trails by 225 votes, the tiniest of margins in the context of the election’s 2.8 million voters, but at this stage a huge Franken lead for Coleman to try to overcome. Nonetheless, Coleman deserves his day in court. The whole time Franken was trailing in the recount, Democrats were braying that every vote had to be counted. Now that Franken is ahead they have lost all interest in determining whether all legally cast ballots have indeed been counted (and whether some have been double-counted).
Minnesota has a well-established method for reexamining an election. It’s a three-stage process: the original canvass, the hand recount in a very close race (defined as one with a margin of less than half a percentage point), and the “election contest,” a trial before three state judges to determine which candidate received the most legally cast ballots. Coleman is simply seeing the process to its conclusion. Indeed, the Minnesota Supreme Court explicitly left some outstanding issues to the “contest” phase, deeming them best decided by the courts. To short-circuit that process now would be a travesty.
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Coleman’s strongest case is on duplicate counting. In several precincts where the voters were expected to favor Franken, it appears that ballots were counted twice. Duplicates were made of damaged ballots, but election officials failed to mark these as copies and subsequently failed to sequester them from the remainder of the ballots. That these ballots were counted twice is not a mere hypothesis—the
Wall Street Journal reports that in 25 Minnesota precincts there were more ballots counted than voters who voted. This produced a vote gain for Franken, in circumstances that members of both parties ought to consider indefensible.
But even if Coleman prevails on the duplication issue, it will gain him only about 130 votes. That’s why he has put such emphasis of late on absentee ballots that allegedly were rejected improperly. Coleman argues that some fraction of the 11,000 absentee ballots excluded for noncompliance—e.g., for a non-match between the signature on the ballot application and the one on the return envelope—were wrongly rejected, and wants their rejection reviewed in the election contest.
Here, Coleman is playing catch-up to Franken. During the recount, the Franken forces scoured the state for supposedly improperly rejected absentee ballots, and local officials in Democratic counties obliged by finding some 1,300 of them. About 900 ended up being counted—in an agreement reached by the Coleman and Franken campaigns—and this boosted Franken’s lead from 47 to 225 (safely beyond the point where subtracting Franken’s double-counted ballots could overcome it).
This race was basically a tie. Any outcome is going to be imperfect, and will understandably disappoint one side or the other. Minnesota officials and the Minnesota courts are trying to count every legally cast ballot—once. Democrats should let them do their work and drop the self-serving theatrics.
