How to steal an election, Coleman versus Franken
Topics: Democracy
22 Dec 2008
From: Ervan Darnell
John Lott (the economist) has an interesting look at how the ballot
recount process in Minnesota is biased toward Franken [1]. That's
hardly surprising since most of the people doing the recount are
government officials, and therefore predisposed to like government, i.e.
Democrats. You can look at some of the ballots and see for yourself how
they were counted [2]. The mayhem level is extraordinary with all sorts
of fuzzy rules about where stray marks land on the page. You could get
any outcome you want by choosing a set of rules that seem neutral on
their face but favor your candidate.
The whole process seems broken. You have partisans for each side
fishing through the ballots looking for ones to challenge. How easy
might it be to add a stray mark during that process (a single pen stroke
can invalidate a vote)? How subjective is that in the first place as
maybe one side has a more critical eye than the other? I don't know
exactly about Minnesota, but I haven't seen anything that talks about
completeness. Indeed, they even "found" some ballots after the
election. Any process that doesn't a priori say ballots with sequence
#'s 1, 5, 10, 20003, etc. have been used and is then able to produce
exactly those ballots is suspect. Yes, that's a high standard, but one
that should be met.
I'm waiting to hear the level of complaining that happened after the
Florida 2000 vote about broken process. As it seems likely the
Democrats are going to win this one, I suspect we won't hear much about
fixing the broken process. Even when the complaints are legitimate,
they have a biasing effect when only applied to certain elections.
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[1] http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,470892,00.html
[2]
http://senaterecount.startribune.com/ballots/index.php?review_date 08-12-16&index=55
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