Rice County Republicans

It has just been announced (about 1PM CDT, 30 June 2009) that Al Franken, comedian, has been declared the winner in Minnesota’s 2008 Senatorial election over Norm Coleman (R). With the Minnesota Supreme Court having played kingmaker we are reminded of the 2000 presidential election. Shortly after that contest was decided (also by a court), the bumper stickers appeared … “He’s not MY president“. Do we need “He’s not MY Senator” stickers?

We in Minnesota are confronted with being represented by two (D)emocratic Senators. With such a tight margin in this election,  it is probably fair to say that 49% of the people in this state now have no voice in the Federal Senate. But, as has been argued before in similar circumstances, the Republicans are all about following the rules and living by them, and we expect that we will be mindful of our role in letting this happen. What lessons have we learned? I suspect there are three key lessons:

1. Third parties hurt. We must pay more attention to the large core of voters who now make up the Liberty coalition. These fiscal conservatives often have either a laissez faire view of social issues, or they point to the 10th Amendment to the US Consitution to deflect social issues from the national level. They (well, a couple of thousand at least) may have defected, leaving the social conservatives to fend for themselves.
   [after one of our readers commented that this was confusing, I add the following clarification, sorry for the confusion.]
   We cannot and should not alienate fiscal conservatives in this way. When we say the party needs to get back to its roots, I believe it is the fiscal conservatives who will lead us there.
2. Absentee ballots are not as good a deal as they seem. I personally will never count on an absentee ballot again, since apparently (according to this ruling) the rules are different for absentee ballots over in-person ballots.
3. Counting and recounting are statistical exercises, not actuarial events. Election laws that pretend otherwise may not be in the best interests of the voters. But recognizing and reacting to this distinction may be beyond the ability of the press to explain, let alone the legislature to implement.

In the meantime, we can only hope that the headlong rush to bankruptcy that we are engaged in at the national level will not be made worse by this ruling.  Al Franken is a smart man, maybe he will see past the hog-fest and will actually act to protect the children by not mortgaging their lives to pay for today’s largesse.

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Footnote: In his speech, Sen. Coleman made exactly the point made above (Republicans are all about following the rules and living by them), which is that it is the rule of law that must be our touchstone.

And another country heard from …  from the Wall Street Journal, “The ‘Absentee’ Senator” writes:

Mr. Franken trailed Mr. Coleman by 725 votes after the initial count on election night and 215 after the first canvass. The Democrat’s strategy from the start was to manipulate the recount in a way that would discover votes that could add to his total. The Franken legal team swarmed the recount, aggressively demanding that votes that had been disqualified be added to his count, while others be denied for Mr. Coleman.

But the team’s real goldmine were absentee ballots, thousands of which the Franken team claimed had been mistakenly rejected. While Mr. Coleman’s lawyers demanded a uniform standard for how counties should re-evaluate these rejected ballots, the Franken team ginned up an additional 1,350 absentees from Franken-leaning counties. By the time this treasure hunt ended, Mr. Franken was 312 votes up, and Mr. Coleman was left to file legal briefs.

(and then, later)

This is now the second time Republicans have been beaten in this kind of legal street fight. In 2004, Dino Rossi was ahead in the election-night count for Washington Governor against Democrat Christine Gregoire. Ms. Gregoire’s team demanded the right to rifle through a list of provisional votes that hadn’t been counted, setting off a hunt for “new” Gregoire votes. By the third recount, she’d discovered enough to win. This was the model for the Franken team.

See also “Mischief in Minnesota” (same WSJ)