Yes! I am so happy! Now if Al wins and we pick up Georgia do we need Joe Lieberman? Anyone have the count?

just saw it, whoooooohooooooooooooooo!

“So… can anyone here ’splain me why exactly is it that a recount takes 1-2 weeks to perform, whereas on election day the same ballots can all be counted within just a few hours? Is it that extra folks are hired just for election day, or that the count vs. recount procedures are materially different? Or something else?

(Signed) Perplexed in Extremis”

Limited to the Minnesota Recount…

We universally use paper ballots with ‘fill in the oval’ markings, counted by scanners in the Precinct on election day. Once scanned, the paper ballots are kicked into a ballot box that is sealed. All absentee ballots are counted in the precinct on election day, and Minnesota has no provisional ballots, as qualified voters can register at the polls, or correct registration issues on election day.

All aspects of vote counting are in Minnesota Statutes. Virtually nothing is based on Sec. of State rulings, and very few things can be dealt with by the courts until the entire process is complete. In Minnesota Law a Recount is Mandatory if the margin between two candidates is less than one half of one percent (.5). In this case the margin is 206 votes out of nearly 2.9 million, or .007. The machine scanning method is highly accurate, but it does not pick up votes that are incorrectly marked. For instance a check-mark in the oval may not count. Some voters don’t follow directions, and they circle the name of the person they vote for. Our law directs us to count votes where the intent of the voter can be determined, and the law actually contains these two examples. We know from previous recounts (and we do them all the time) that out of every 1000 ballots, about 2 will not register on the scanners. Thus for this election there are probably about 6000 uncounted votes in the Senate Race.

At any rate, we are now at the point where the County Canvas’s have been completed, and Coleman has a margin of 206 over Franken’s numbers. Remember there is a third party candidate in this who got about 15% of the votes. These numbers will be sent to the State Canvas Board next Tuesday — the date is in law — and they will observe that Coleman’s margin is well within the .5 and thus triggers the Mandated Recount, which will begin the next day.

Minnesota has 87 counties, and all ballots are counted in the county by election officials and Judges from the Election Day staff. Two or three persons are on each counting team. They first sort the ballots in one precinct into piles — Franken, Coleman, Barkley, other and those that need interpreting based on “Intent of the Voter” — then they independently count the piles, and write their count on a tally sheet. If they agree, fine. If they don’t agree, they re-count. The representatives of the candidates can challenge interpretations of “intent of the voter” — and those ballots are sealed for each county, and sent to the State Canvas Board for counting. They are required to apply the statutes as to how to interpret “intent of the voter” — and eventually these ballots are added to the precinct results. In the end, the results of the Recount are what determines the winner — and the Board can green light the Sec. of State to issue a Certificate of Election. This can be challenged in court primarly on the grounds that the Recount did not follow State Law. As long as they carefully follow the law, that challenge would probably fail.

Minnesota has this very detailed Election and Recount process law largely because we had a very serious election problem in 1962-63 in the Governor’s race. We didn’t have good law then — it was piecemeal, some pieces were contradictory, so we ended up in the courts trying to figure out how to count a recount, First in State Court, then the Republicans went into Federal Court, the 8th Circut ruled it belonged in State Court, the Republicans asked for Supreme Court Review, they affirmed the 8th Circut so it went back to State Court, and they ordered and supervised the recount. We didn’t get started counting till December, and the Governor’s term ended January 1, so for a couple of months we had two Governor’s, but they counted the whole thing — and in the end Rolvaag, the DFL’er won by about 123 votes. The change from the preliminary vote to the final vote was about 200 ballots. So one result of that mess was the Legislature got busy and wrote a Recount Law that put the whole process into the Statutes, and very clearly laid out the meaning of “intent of the voter.” With a few modifications over the years, particularly after we modernized the whole system of elections in the late 80’s, it has remained the same.

I have no idea how this will all come out in the end — of course I want Franken to prevail, but I also want the whole process to go very cleanly, and ultimately show that you can indeed do it right. And it will take about a month. We probably will get daily read-outs on the count — pay no real attention to comparisons with the initial machine count, what a Recount means is we start the count over again — the old numbers are off the table. Of course precinct by precinct comparisons will be of some interest if you know the nature of these precincts — for instance mine had about a thousand first time University Student voters — others had lots of new citizens voting for the first time. Those may be where we will find undervotes that were not counted by the scanners that will be counted in the manual votecount.

Coleman’s organization and the RNC have been busy trying to subvert the recount by scumming up the process. Today they called Mark Richie, Sec of State, a Communist — and they keep trying to get into court, which isn’t possible till the whole process is complete, and then on the narrow grounds of failure to follow State Law. But even the newspapers that endorsed Coleman have criticized these tactics — there is a great deal of pride in Minnesota in very accurate and clean elections. The Florida script will probably not work here. Not saying they won’t try.