Franken has decided to sue his way to victory, he has demanded and (in one county won) a list of all of the people whose ballots have been thrown out. Al wants to contact them and find out what their real intentions were. in other words he wants to strong arm them.
Read the full story below:
Al Franken's Minnesota
Al Franken's campaign takes exception to our recent description of the curious goings-on in Minnesota's Senate vote count. We're delighted to hear his growing vote total is all routine. But who needs to worry about votes discovered in a car when the Franken campaign is now suing in court to steal the election?Minnesota this week began its official statewide recount, and Mr. Franken isn't hanging on the outcome. Instead, he's trying to conjure up enough other, previously disqualified, ballots to overturn Mr. Coleman's 215-vote lead. The Democrat needs to invent votes because he knows it will be tough to win a normal recount. Minnesota uses optical scanning machines, which are far more accurate than the punchcard paper ballots of the 2000 Florida recount. Prior recounts in Minnesota have resulted in few vote changes.
So off to court he goes, with Mr. Franken demanding that the state canvassing board delay certifying the initial election results. His campaign claims that absentee votes may have been wrongly rejected by election judges. Team Franken filed a lawsuit in Ramsey County (the state's second largest, and an area Mr. Franken won decisively) demanding a list of these absentee voters, so that the Democrat can contact them, get them to declare their ex post facto preference, and, presto, he wins.
The state attorney general's office ruled against a canvassing board delay, finding that certification was purely an administrative function and that any question of absentee ballots ought to be left to the courts. The problem is that at least one court has entertained this Franken ploy. Ramsey County Judge Dale Lindman this week ordered county officials to give Mr. Franken a list of voters who had cast rejected absentee ballots.
Put aside that these ballots have already been ruled on by trained election judges. Put aside, too, the invasion of voter privacy. The real problem of allowing Mr. Franken to conduct his own voter discovery operation is that this is changing the rules after the election has been held. The gambit introduces subjective judgment and political pressure into a voting process that is supposed to be immune to both.
Opening up the rejected-ballot question is also a recipe for potential fraud. When the Franken campaign filed its initial lawsuit demanding access to the voter lists, it used as an example an 84-year-old woman in Beltrami County whose vote was supposedly rejected because she'd had a stroke, and therefore her signature on her absentee ballot did not match the one on file. After some outside investigation, the Franken campaign admitted that the story was not true, and that her ballot had been rejected for entirely different (and legitimate) reasons.
Mr. Franken is also trying to raise public doubt about an "undervote" -- suggesting that only machine error can explain why he received 12.2 percentage points fewer votes than did Barack Obama. But the Senate race had three serious candidates, not two. Maybe fewer Minnesotans liked a left-wing candidate who ran a nasty campaign. In any case, the same Democrats who claimed Florida was "stolen" by faulty ballot machines are now trying to discredit the optical-scanners that they have demanded -- all in order to sway the human judges who'll rule on Mr. Franken's legal challenges.
The joker's goal is to sow enough doubt about the vote so that if he loses the recount he can attract public support to challenge the final result in court. This is a slap at Minnesota, which, so far at least, appears to be doing all it can to make the recount open and transparent. Minnesota should respond by telling Mr. Franken that even a celebrity has to play by the rules.
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