A Little Too Close For Comfort

Democrat Al Franken is now within less than 250 votes of Republican Norm Coleman's Senate seat in Minnesota, and with a hand recount mandated by state law, Coleman is getting extremely nervous. So nervous in fact, that according to the always prescient Josh Marshall, it looks like he's getting ready to call voter fraud on Franken.

Apropos of my post below, I'm getting word that Coleman may be in the process of fielding the lawyers for a replay of President Bush's 2000 recount smackdown. And this from the Associated Press gives a clue to why he is getting worried ...

An Associated Press analysis of the nearly 25,000-vote difference in Minnesota presidential and U.S. Senate race tallies shows that most ballots lacking a recorded Senate vote were cast in counties won by Democrat Barack Obama.

So what does that mean? Minnesota voted are counted by optical scan machine. A hand recount of those 25,000 ballots would almost certainly give Franken the win, as they were ballots that had a legitimate vote scanned for President but NOT Senator. The odds of that many ballots being purposely left blank are extremely low, so a hand count determining if these ballots were marked lightly or mis-scanned could give Franken several thousand more additional votes than Coleman and give him the win.

Coleman will now do everything he can to stop any of those votes being counted: the same trick Bush pulled in Florida in 2000.

Three counties -- Hennepin, Ramsey and St. Louis -- account for 10,540 votes in the dropoff. Each saw Obama win with 63 percent or more.

Ballots that showed a presidential vote but no Senate vote are called the "undervote." Statewide, more than 18,000 of those ballots came from counties won by Obama with more than half the vote. About 6,100 were in counties won by Republican John McCain with at least 50 percent.

In 13 counties, the two ran about even; in all, those counties combined for 707 ballots without a Senate preference.

In other words, undervotes in counties where Obama won BIG massively exceed the undervotes in McCain country, specifically in the three largest urban counties of the state.

There's voter fraud going on here, alright. But it's not ACORN's doing. And Norm Coleman knows if those votes are counted by hand he will lose. So, naturally, he's going to sue to stop the hand recount and cite Bush v Gore as precedent.

I used to live in Hennepin County. The people there aren't stupid. Minnesotans take voting seriously. We'll see what happens, but I agree completely with Josh and can almost guarantee this one's going to court.