Franken, My Dear, I Don't Give A Damn

The good news: Al Franken has been declared the winner in the Minnesota Senate Race. The bad news is that Norm Coleman has already vowed to sue and take this to the Supreme Court if necessary (something I discussed last month). The weird news? The Wall Street Journal's editorial board screaming that Coleman was robbed by basically lying about the circumstances of the recount procedure.

Who better to take that electoral nonsense apart than FiveThirtyEight.com's Nate Silver?

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".

Nate delivers the goods on this one...read the whole thing.