Rice County Republicans

A recent commentary at TrueNorth reminds us of the unfortunate effect that politics has on our politician’s application of their principles …

Immediately following the election, trailing Senator Coleman by an incredibly narrow margin, Al Franken began the traditional Democratic “count every vote” drumbeat. Franken instituted litigation to accompany the drumbeat. Working through a maze including a trip to the Minnesota Supreme Court that led to the inclusion of 933 previously rejected absentee ballots with Senator Coleman’s agreement, Franken emerged at the end of the recount with a 225-vote lead.

Yet more than 11,000 absentee ballots were left out of the recount. They were excluded by local officials for various infractions of the absentee ballot statute. Somewhere between the trip to the Minnesota Supreme Court and the 225-vote lead, Franken lost interest in counting every vote. Indeed, Franken has taken advantage of some votes that seem to have been counted twice in heavily Democratic precincts.

Among the ballots that have remained uncounted are those of servicemen voting under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act if their balltos were received by election officials after the deadline for normal absentee ballots. (The Republican National Lawyers Association has issued a press release and accompanying white paper on the subject.)

After the recount, Senator Coleman picked up the “count every vote” drumbeat. In the election contest that he brought to challenge the result of the recount, Senator Coleman has argued that the technical requirements of the absentee ballot statute should be disregarded if they were not uniformly observed throughout Minnesota. Arguing for disregard of the applicable requirements of state law, the traditional Democratic-Republican role reversal was complete.

I have long argued that Bush won in the highly litiginous 2000 election because (R)’s play by the rules (which wanted the state legislature to decide ties, and the vote count was certainly a statistical tie). I also argued early in this process that the (R)’s would again play by the rules, but there is clearly a shortfall in the clarity of those rules.  Allowing recounts at this level is clearly a bad idea. Perhaps it is time to adopt the electoral college strategy that limits recounting to the states. A similarly adopted strategy that would give each precint (the vote counters at the most detailed level) proportional vote according to their population at the last census would mean that the recount would be fought at a much more detailed level, and at a level that would isolate (like a fusable link) damages to just one precinct at a time. But such a strategy would work against the highly (D) cities so I would expect we will continue with out state-wide recount process.