Fun With Numbers

"Mistakes are a part of being human. Appreciate your mistakes for what they are: precious life lessons that can only be learned the hard way. Unless it's a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from." ~ Al Franken

In a previous post about Minnesota's new Senator, Al Franken, I made this statement in the comment thread:

"[I]n many counties in Minnesota, there were more votes counted for Franken than there were registered voters".

My resident Liberal, Jim, who I have yet to run off (nor do I want to), pounced on that statement, and demanded I supply citation or shut up. Actually, to be fair to Jim, his comment was, "Cite it, prove it, or shove it".

So, despite the fact that I really don't like to do research, I began googling the words, "more votes for Franken than registered voters", and found, to my surprise, there wasn't any concrete evidence that my statement was true.

I wrote it because I had read it on some other blogs, and never considered it might not be supportable.

So, I shoved it, figuratively speaking.

I did find the original article that made the charge. It was from the Wall Street Journal, and I published the appropriate link in my next thread comment.

The singular statement made by the WSJ, which spawned all the other references to counties with more votes for Franken than registered voters was, "This helps explain why more than 25 precincts now have more ballots than voters who signed in to vote", yet the WSJ, nor any of their affiliates have provided any citation in support of that statement.

But, I did find some interesting information regarding how Franken could have ended up with more votes than Coleman despite the fact that Coleman had, when the votes were counted on election night, 775 votes more than Franken. By Minnesota law, that is grounds for an immediate recount, since the final vote tallied at less than 1% difference between candidates.

Al Franken didn't demand the first recount. He didn't need to, although, if not for Minnesota state law, he probably would have. It is Minnesota law that elections that close have to be recounted.

Nevertheless, the first recount showed Coleman still led Franken by 215 votes. This should have been final, but then Franken demanded another recount. And another. And another, until the results were more to his liking.

Here's what happened:

According to the WSJ, "Under Minnesota law, election officials are required to make a duplicate ballot if the original is damaged during Election Night counting. Officials are supposed to mark these as "duplicate" and segregate the original ballots".

But, they didn't segregate the original ballots, as required, but instead, added the total of duplicate ballots counted to the total of original ballots.

For example, say one precinct had 100 ballots originally cast for Franken and 90 cast for Coleman. By law, the election commission should figuratively throw out the original ballots (because they are damaged) and only count the duplicates. But, instead, they counted the duplicates, and then added the total of duplicate ballots to the total of original ballots. Now, Franken has 200 votes and Coleman, 180.

That results in an increase of 10 votes more for Franken than for Coleman. Now, recount again, and this time add the newest totals, once again, to the earlier totals, instead of throwing the original ( the first recount results) away.

The new results? 300 for Franken and 270 for Coleman. That's 20 more votes for Franken than were actually cast.

And, that's only in one precinct!

This method of recounting could conceivably go on forever, or until some one stops the process, whichever comes first.

But, now, consider that this same odd method of recounting ballots may have taken place in other precincts, all precincts that traditionally vote Democratic. This creative recounting, in the end, netted Franken 225 votes more than Coleman, and Franken won the election.

It wouldn't be at all difficult to believe precincts that traditionally vote Republican recounted the ballots the right way, with the final tally probably not much different than the original, if different at all.

Liberal Jim makes the point, "Why didn't Coleman charge this in any of his lawsuits?", which is a very good question, but one I'd have to direct to Coleman, as I don't know.

But if I were to hazard a guess, I'd say because Norm Coleman knew in advance how the Liberally-biased Minnesota Supreme court would decide, and refused to waste his valuable time and resources.