How Fair are Elections?

The rulings in the Minnesota case of the Senate election contest between Norm Coleman and Al Franken would appear to grant the seat to Franken. I've read as much as I can find on the interesting race, recount, and subsequent legal challenge. My conclusion is that Franken will get the seat, not because he polled more Minnesota votes, but because he had a more aggressive legal team and stronger Democratic machine behind him.

The best analysis of the whole controversial election can be found at powerlineblog.com. I'll try to summarize the essential story on my own.

The election ended with Coleman ahead by only a few hundred votes. The recount required by statute was completed by each county election board, with an aggressive and well-funded team of Franken lawyers looking over their shoulders. Apparently, Coleman's camp was much less aggressive, and somehow the recount tipped the scales to a razor-thin margin for Franken.

Coleman's court contest of the election focused on the fact that Democrat dominated counties deviated from Minnesota state law in counting ballots, while Republican dominated counties held to the letter of the law. In other words, if an absentee ballot was not filled out, signed, and filed per Minnesota election law, the Democrat electors often counted it anyway, while Republicans did not.

Stories have surfaces throughout the process of precincts turning in more votes than they had registered voters; a couple hundred ballots suddenly turned up in a Democrat elector's trunk a couple of days after the election and were counted, even though 100% of those ballots happened to be marked for Franken; and another hundred-some votes were run through the machine twice at a Democrat precinct.

The election court ruled that about 400 previously rejected ballots were to be counted, but I haven't found the specific reasons why they were rejected or why they now must be counted. Those ballots apparently added another 100 votes net for Franken.

So Coleman is appealing to the Minnesota Supreme Court, and the case could eventually make its way to the US Supreme Court. Coleman's argument is that the process violated Equal Protection under the Law, because Democrat precincts were allowed to count ballots technically in violation of election law while Republican precincts followed the letter of the law. Coleman's case says that the local election boards were allowed to use their own judgement, and the lack of uniform standards applied to which ballots were counted and which were not amounts to an unfair application of the law which clearly favored the Democrat candidate.

There is no provision in Minnesota law for remedies to this situation. There also is no way to review all of those votes that have already been counted to throw out those that were illegally cast. So the court's ruling decided that since the only legal remedy is not available, there is no remedy but to seat Franken on the basis of the 350 or so vote differential he currently holds. The problem with Coleman's suggested remedy, which is to include 4,000 rejected ballots to make up for the fact that the Democrat precincts counted some significant but unknown number of ballots with the same flaws, is that the remedy would actually cause Minnesota's laws to be broken in order to count them.

Of course, there's the whole other issue in Minnesota of voting fraud. Everyone has by now heard of Obama's ACORN machine's vote fraud activities, which were just as prevalent in Minnesota as anywhere. Minnesota hasn't implemented Indiana's solution to voting fraud, simply requiring voters to show a valid identification when they appear at the polls.

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence of college students from Wisconsin fraudulently registering and voting, along with illegal immigrants, convicted felons, dead people, fictional characters, and other well-publicized tricks so favored by that party.

But again, there is no law on the books in Minnesota that permits or even makes possible a review of fraudulently cast votes. If somebody showed up at the polls and voted, or submitted an absentee ballot filled out properly, whether or not the voter was eligible matters not.

So can it be said that Franken won fairly? I don't think so.

Then there's the prosecutorial misconduct discovery against Ted Stevens in Alaska. His charges were dropped and his conviction overturned, and the prosecutors in that case may be prosecuted themselves. The FBI agent who uncovered this misconduct may have uncovered a broad Democrat conspiracy that caused the overzealous prosecution with the goal of gaining the magical filibuster-proof majority for the party.

And the New York race that is apparently still to close to call is another to be monitored to see whether we actually have free and fair elections in this country. Could it be that we've already become like China, Cuba, or the old Soviet Union, where elections are predestined by the ruling party?

Possibly.