Recounting past tales

Where is all the conservative bloviating about election theft in Minnesota this cycle? Oh, right, their guy, Tom Emmer, is behind this time, behind by almost 9,000 votes.

When Al Franken and Norm Coleman were nip and tuck, Minnesota wingnuts screamed that Franken and the DFL were stealing the election. No amount of transparency in the recount - not even posting every single contested ballot on line - could allay their hysteria.

Now, however? The Republican-desired recount is not a mugging at all. In fact, important GOP officials still can't stop fighting the battle of 2008, even as they follow the Democrats' example to keep recounting in 2010:

State GOP chairman Tony Sutton jumped in: "We are not going to get rolled this time."

Sutton is morally stunted. He can't even apply the golden rule, can't see his opponents as justified in the Senatorial recount, all the while having totally signed onto this recount even though it is much less plausible that it might change the Election Day outcome.

Oh, and this time, Tim Pawlenty (R-me, choose me!) expects to remain governor for the duration of any recount. And maybe during any lawsuit filed by Emmer, too. So that he can govern in a term to which he was not elected with the now-Republican state legislature at his side.

"I don't think there's any downside to keeping this recount going on as long as possible," said a high-level Republican operative who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "If we keep the process going, there are opportunities for us in the upcoming legislative session."

I've said it before, but it bears repeating:

• Democrats want to count (and recount, if necessary) the votes and let that determine the winner.
• Republicans want to win and the hell with the will of the people.

Republicans think elections are casino games, they are the house, and they should win all ties. And all races anywhere close to a tie. Maybe even all races that they just imagine they should win.

And the hell with democracy.

Confession

For the Party of No, a missing yes is just as good in the Senate as a present no. The continuing farce in Minnesota has become an illegitimate abuse of process.


Norm Coleman is a capable speaker of the wingnut creed.

Fighting the consequences of elections

Republicans oppose democracy:

NRSC Chairman John Cornyn has said Coleman's challenge could go through federal courts and take "years" to resolve. He also threatened "World War III" if Democrats try to seat Franken prematurely.

Yet there's no hue and cry from the big media, who continue to think bipartisanship is even possible with these anti-election extremists.

Go nuclear on Cornyn. He's asking for it. Do it in such a way as to preserve the traditional prerogatives of the minority - so long as they don't abuse it.

But let Cornyn not make the mistake of believing there's any comity left in the Senate.

Foolish consistency

Both Republicans and Democrats approach dead heat elections consistently:

• Democrats always say, "Count the legal votes, and certify whoever has the most."
• Republicans always say, "Tie goes to the Republican."

Norm Coleman's lead on election night should be completely definitive:

Norm won on election day and everything has been corrupt since then. Mark Ritchie = hack. --johngalt18

Today!

But John Boehner is telling the press that he's confident the Republican will win. No, not just confident. Jim Tedisco "will win."

For my part: Count the votes. Recount the votes. When the count is right, declare the winner.

Calvinball gets a new name

Colemanball:

As Coleman, a Republican, listened from his lawyers' table, Friedberg said that a strict standard requiring that each element of absentee voting be met -- being properly registered, signing both the envelope and application, having it witnessed by a registered voter, and more -- "doesn't exist anywhere in Anglo-American jurisprudence."

Read that again. Coleman's lawyer is explicitly arguing that the four corners of the statute don't exist in jurisprudence. To make sense, that means he is asking the court to disregard the law and make up new law.

The irony is that Bushists accused Democrats of this in 2000, when in fact Democrats wanted interpretation and standards for intent of the voter, which was already law. Republican Coleman's lawyers want to throw out the law and rewrite it for their convenience.

And their wingnut supporters will claim that Democrats are stealing this election. They really can't tell the difference between truth and a lie.

Franken sense

One commenter on CNN, someone who calls himself Musicboy8, gets the cosmic joke that reality is playing on the wingnuts, if only they had consistency circuits in their brains:

February 16th, 2009 2:39 pm ET

You know what the really funny thing is here? All of the Republican clones are upset that a man who was a professional humorist is going to be a Senator, and then they turn right around and bow at the alter of a dead president who starred in "Bedtime for Bonzo"…..lol. Sorry, little red voters, your double standard is showing. You lost, democracy won, not hush and let the new leaders start cleaning up your mess.

Unfairness doctrine

The frothing wingnuts are everywhere, spilling bile as if it were water. Now and then I find one willing to spill blood (Matt at January 5th, 2009 4:12 pm ET):

The end of democracy as we know it. This is whithout [sic] a doubt the most fixed election ever. There was no standard other than cheat enough to have Franken pull ahead and then stop counting.

When democracy ceases to function and if you pay enough money you can subvert the will of the people to your whims. Then there is only one thing left for the comman man to do.

Civil War.

Reading the hate and ignorance in any mass market comments section makes me less than sanguine of the happy fate of democracy. Sanguinary? Yeah.

There's plenty of ignorance on the left, though it comes nowhere near matching the sheer stupidity of the right, but the real yawning abyss of disparity is in hate. We make fun of them, despise some of them, hate a select few. They hate us all.

The wingnuts have forgotten their kindergarten lessons - how to use their inside voices, how to play nice with others, how to use their words instead of their puny little fists to settle disputes, how not to bite their classmates, how to accept not getting their infantile narcissistic way right goddamn now from mommy every goddamn time, how not to throw a tantrum even if they're disappointed. They have no sense whatsoever of a commonwealth that extends beyond them.

They have lost this most basic socialization - hey, they're against socialism, why not be against socialization - because of the swill they listen to on talk radio and Fox News. They have public models of ugliness that allow them cover to revise and extend that ugliness forever.

And that gives their petty little 2-year-old's ids such a thrill of delight that only isolation could ever make them stop. Instead, they have a permanent play date with their mutual dittoheads, with whom they have constant self-reinforcing tantrums.

America is much the lesser for it.

God must love idiots

He made so many of them. Yes, Abe Lincoln was much more generous than I am. Of course, he still wanted some of the idiots to vote for him.

Today's featured dunce calls herself doxiemom:

Why Should Frankenstein Win by Only 49 Votes?

When Coleman couldn't win with his 200-300 votes. Seems that Coelman's original 200-300 votes should trump Frankenstein's crummy 49. Coleman still has more votes.

I'm sure she has no idea what a doxie is, but that's the least of her being unclear on the concept.

Sweet sixteen, part 3

Been there, done that. Now it's time for me to stagger belatedly across the finish line with assessments of the remaining four ballots that Norm Coleman asked the Minnesota Canvassing Board to reconsider. (The Board rejected his request, I think mistakenly in some cases.)

13. Hennepin County, Plymouth W3 P 15, Ballot 6 - I agree with the Board that this is an undervote. It's what I call a false start, not a vote at all. There are more than a hundred such marks among the 6600-some-odd ballots that were challenged. Some are mere dots, some are larger than this example.

14. Lake County, unorganized territory #2, Ballot 1 - This is not at all similar to ballot 13, but the Board got it right, too. Every voted race has two marks, one a check mark, the other a filled oval. It's impossible to discern true voter intent from that. If the non-standard mark had been an X instead of a check, I might have accepted this as a Coleman vote, but a check is an approval mark, so I'd guess that this is slightly more likely to be a Franken vote than a Coleman, but a guess is not enough.

The comparable for ballot 14 is Le Sueur County, Le Center, Ballot 28. (The other listed comparable is Dakota County, Inver Grove Heights P7, Ballot 2, but it is apparently not posted on the MPR site.) This comparable is significantly different from ballot 14. This voter's standard vote mark is a filled oval with a diagonal slash that is probably a check mark. In addition, however, there are several down-ballot races that appear to have been voted with slashes only. To complicate matters, the Senate race is marked both ways, the filled oval with slash for Franken and the slash only for Coleman. However, the Coleman mark is the only slash on the ballot that has a perpendicular mark across it, too, and that justifies counting the vote for Franken. Why don't I think this slash is a check mark rather than a strike-through? There's no precedent of other check marks on this ballot.

15. Carver County, Victoria P2, Ballot 9 - A successful challenge from Franken that took a vote away from Coleman, and Norm wants it back. The only race whose mark has a slash through it is the Coleman mark, so I agree with the Board that this is an undervote.

16. Hennepin County, Minneapolis W7 P8, Ballot 3 - Similar to ballot 15 but a little more difficult to call. This ballot has a unique mark next to Coleman's name on a ballot that is otherwise very consistent in its use of Xes to signify a vote. The Coleman mark has two Xes and a filled oval, and frankly I have no idea what the voter intended.

The comparables are:

• Mahnomen County, Waubun, Ballot 1 - Doesn't appear to be comparable, although it is a puzzle why a voter would make the vertical lines on every race except President. I'd still count all the down-ballot votes, including the mark for Franken.
  
• St. Louis County, Duluth P16, Ballot 2 - A potential cross-out and unique in that, so I'd call this an undervote and take away a vote for Franken.
  
• Dakota County, Burnsville P10, Ballot 1 - If I looked only at the first column of the ballot, I'd exclude this Franken vote, but column three has similar votes, so I agree with the Board.
  

True to typical best-foot-forward presentation (so I've heard about high school debate, for instance), Coleman front-loaded his best arguments, but there are definitely some good arguments among them.

Final cumulative tally: +4 for Coleman, -5 for Franken.

Note: My calls here would deprive Al of 20% of his nanofilament lead. Too bad. Let the votes fall where they may.

Sweet sixteen, part 2

Back to the Coleman appeals of Canvassing Board decisions, even though the board has already rejected them, picking up with ballot 6.

6. Douglas County, Miltona, Ballot 2 - Pretty sure this is the right ballot since it actually has an ambiguity, though from name alone this other ballot could have been the one. This was ruled an undervote, not a vote for Coleman.
7. Dakota County, South St. Paul P2 W1, Ballot 1 - Another ballot with an X through the filled oval, also ruled an undervote.

Both of these ballots have intentional cross-outs. My criterion is that no other blackened ovals are Xed out. I think they were correctly ruled by the Canvassing Board. However, one of the comparable Franken votes has the same problem. Hubbard County, Lakeport Township, Ballot 1 is an undervote, while Blue Earth County, Mapleton, Ballot 8 is ruled correctly as a Franken vote because there are other votes with similar crossing marks in the oval.

8. Dakota County, Eagan P4, Ballot 1 - The comparable is Benton County, Langola, Ballot 1, and I agree they should be ruled the same way, which adds a vote for Coleman. Both have marks that combine a filled oval and an X, but there's precedent elsewhere on the ballot for that being an intended vote.

9. Dakota County, Eagan P12, Ballot 1
10. Le Sueur County, Waterville, Ballot 14
11. Hennepin County, Minneapolis W8 P4, Ballot 2 - Probable voter name only.
12. Hennepin County, Plymouth W4 P20, Ballot 1

All these ballots were ruled to be spoiled by identifying marks, but most of them were redacted from the public copies. The comparables (first 3 for Coleman, last 2 for Franken) from the Coleman campaign are:

• Ottertail County, Fergus Falls W1 P2, Ballot 2 - Editorializing on the ballot but no name.
  
• St. Louis County, Duluth P27, Ballot 2 - Write-in with a phone number. Could be the voter, but a write-in should be a legitimate vote.
  
• Wright County, Buffalo P1, Ballot 9 - Explanation to the counting machine (!?) with an apparent voter name.
  
• Hennepin County, Plymouth W3 P15, Ballot 2 - Explanation of cross-outs, although redaction makes the full picture less than obvious.
  
• Big Stone County, Odessa, Ballot 1 - Probable voter name crossed out.
  

Without seeing the redactions, it's hard to judge these ballots. Arbitrarily, I'm going to disqualify any ballot that needs to be redacted, as well as ballot 11, the third Coleman comparable, and both Franken comparables.

It's possible that I'm wrong to do this. The Canvassing Board could be enforcing a single standard that I just haven't heard about - or so I hope. It's possible that they want to accept any ballot for which the alleged distinguishing marks have another clear purpose.

Net tally so far (including the previous ballots): +4 for Coleman, -4 for Franken

Sweet sixteen, part 1

Norm Coleman is appealing sixteen ballots that the Minnesota Canvassing Board has ruled on. I don't have a problem with this. They need to get this right, and every vote clearly matters. I would, however, object if Coleman uses any erroneous ballots to attack the process.

Here's an attempt to be objective about the first five of the sixteen ballots:

1. Hennepin County, Minneapolis W13 P8, Ballot 2 - ruled no vote, I assume because of the apparent initials from the voter
2. Dakota County, Apple Valley P5, Ballot 4 - same ruling, same reason

The comparable Franken ballot that was ruled a vote is Washington County, Stillwater W3 P7, Ballot 88. Indeed, it has what appears to initials, as well. I've already stated that I think the distinguishing mark prohibition is obsolete, but it is the current law of Minnesota. The initials on the Coleman ballots are both in the same box as the votes, but the law doesn't make that distinction, so I agree that these ballots out to receive the same treatment. If the Canvassing Board is going to be liberal about distinguishing marks and look for intent to mark as well as voting intent, I'd give these two to Coleman.

3. Dakota County, Inver Grove Heights P9, Ballot 1 - ruled no vote

I don't need a comparable. There are easily more than 100 such votes in the original list of challenges, and they should be counted. This is a vote for Coleman and a clear error on the part of the Canvassing Board.

4. Wright County, Cokato, Ballot 6 - ruled overvote
5. Wright County, Annandale, Ballot 2 - ruled overvote

The comparables offered by the Coleman campaign are:

• Washington County, Oakdale P2, Ballot 19 - By the way, I'd rule this an undervote, not a Franken vote.
  
• Dakota County, Burnsville P17, Ballot 1 - Based on the voter's pattern, the possible overvote for Barkley is a cross-out, and this is a correctly ruled Franken vote.
  
• Stearns County, Brockway, Ballot 1 - Same ruling and reasoning as the previous example.
  

Problem is, they aren't really comparable. Here's how I'd rule: Ballot 4 is most probably a Coleman vote. The voter's pattern is predominantly to use both an X and a filled circle to represent a vote, and only the marks for Coleman for Senate show both. Ballot 5, on the other hand, is far too puzzling and inconsistent to be confident of voter intent, and I'd rule it an overvote.

Tally so far: +4 for Coleman and -1 for Franken

Update (12/30): See part 2 and part 3 also.

Could vote this way for years

Is this a Coleman vote? I concluded that I couldn't tell what the hell it is. There are just too many ambiguities in the full ballot (alternative link). For example:


There's just no consistent marking at all, so I would reject this ballot entirely.

One of the major flaws in the way we vote is that we never get our ballots back graded. They go in the hopper, and we never know whether they actually count as we intended them.

The voter who cast this ballot could cast similar ballots for years. Judging by the almost random but obviously intended marks over the printed rectangles at the left margin, he's not very capable of learning how to do it right, but there are many unsophisticated voters who could learn with a little more feedback.

A scanner that would show each voter its count of his or her marks would go a long way toward helping us actually get the government we want.

Plus 124 with 1000 to go

My personal count of Minnesota Senate challenges puts Al Franken a hundred and twenty-four votes ahead of Norm Coleman, with an even thousand challenged ballots yet to review. Franken has gained 316 votes by my count since he was behind by 192 after the initial phase of the recount finished.

Based on the past 5742 ballots I've reviewed and even accounting for some bias at the margins since I want Franken to win, I don't think there's any way Coleman can overcome this deficit. He's already in court arguing via Bush v. Gore to keep wrongly excluded absentee ballots from being counted, so they can't help him. That would be a miracle anyway.

It looks as though Coleman's only path to re-election is through the courts. You'd think he was already hiring enough lawyers.

Update: Plus 134 with 500 to go. Coleman needs 317 to 183 to tie. Na ga happen.

Update: Not enough votes left for Coleman to win. Franken leads by 114 with 113 challenged ballots left. Of course, that's just on my scorecard.

Update: Franken at plus 123 with 23 ballots left. The Star Tribune web app won't go forward by any means, and it won't show a ballot. The link to the large PDF is buggered, and the bottom line numbers that report the assessments of other people don't add up to enough ballots. It's better to have the canvassing board working with real ballots!

---

I am assuming that the Star Tribune's web application and database backend are working somewhat properly, and that's a significant assumption since they seem to have retooled it more than once while it has been on-going. Still, to a first order approximation, it's probably accurate enough. But no, I can't explain the discrepancy between the official number of challenges and the number of challenged ballots visible on the site.

Simmering shit soup

Journalists once tried to explain what was explicable. Now, many of them prefer to keep the shit soup simmering. The next day's story is so much easier to write if it's a slight variation on today's.

For instance, if there was a close election and a question arose about how to interpret ballots with similar marks, the AP would show us those marks in their contexts. Instead, the AP lets the completely explicable legitimacy of the process look questionable:

But the members split on another type of challenge, where an X appeared atop or beneath a filled oval. Some were ruled clear votes, others were set aside.

''We're not going to be entirely consistent. Part of it is going to be how the ballot strikes us,'' Supreme Court Chief Justice Eric Magnuson, a board member, said to no one in particular. ''This isn't an exact science.''

Here are ballot markings from two different ballots:




Pretty easy, huh? They both have to count the same way. Wouldn't that be a common standard for intent of the voter? Yeah, but only if you're as simple-minded as the Supreme Court was in Bush v. Gore.

The top mark in context looks like this:


Further, every other vote on the ballot is a filled oval without the X. For example, here's the vote for President:

The voter obviously intended to cross out the Franken vote and vote for Norm Coleman. Sure, he or she should have taken another ballot, but the intent is clear, and this is a legitimate vote.

So the second mark above is a cross-out and doesn't count for Franken? Instead, it's an undervote since all the other ovals are empty? No, look at its context. What does this second voter use to signify intent? Here's the second voter's Presidential vote:


This voter marked several other races with both Xes and filled-in ovals. This is an expression of valid intent.

Don't take my word for it. Go look at these scans:

• The Coleman vote: St.Louis_FloodwoodP1_challengedballot1F.pdf (alternate link)
  
• The Franken vote: St.Louis_DuluthP13_challengedballot2C.pdf (alternate link)

See, now that wasn't so hard.

Distinguishing marks

What's the problem with a distinguishing mark on a ballot, anyway? If someone wants to give up the secrecy of the ballot, why shouldn't he be able to write "Lizard People" on his ballot? It's not mature, but that's not a requirement for voting, thank goodness. It's a sort of masturbatory joke. Mostly, the joker has to laugh at his own joke, alone. Loser, but again, not illegal.

Only in rare races will the stupid attempt at humor be shared with anyone else, and that person probably already has a headache and is pissed off to be reconciling vote totals for Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse after untold hours checking the public in at the polls. So, try this, and you're not going to get a laugh, much less get lucky.

The Senate recount started in Minnesota shortly after the election on Nov. 5. Right away, the Franken campaign started challenging ballots due to claimed distinguishing marks. The Coleman campaign soon followed suit.

Many of these challenges were frivolous, stupid, and if consistently applied capable of disqualifying lots of random ballots where intent is crystal clear and nothing hinky is going on. If a stray mark or a smudge could disqualify a ballot, why not a distinctive method of filling in an oval?

Although, against that, there are an incredible number of Minnesota voters who put an X through the oval before filling it in. If they thought their mark was distinct, bzzt, wrong. The upside is that their votes will be counted.

It turns out that distinguishing marks spoil a ballot throughout the English-speaking world, at least. There's a lot of case law from the past 150 years or more about. Secret ballots protect the honesty of elections in two ways. First, they prevent some forms of intimidation. If the goons can't tell how you voted, they can't extract the consequences of dissent from your hide.

It's still true that they can intimidate you if they can tell how you're likely to vote, say, if you're black and therefore unlikely to vote for some lizard-brained sleazeball of a white supremacist. Just for example. But I digress.

Secret ballots also prevent a political machine from paying off voters who vote their way. They're not just for protection of the voter; they protect the election.

Once upon a time, political parties printed their own ballots (hence ticket), which they preferred to mark visibly so that they could keep track of their captive voters. Once the government took that over, you might be able to put your initials next to Boss Tweed's candidate so that the poll workers could tell. In either case, there would be a few extra bucks for you to spend in the bar celebrating victory. Not an honest victory, but a good stiff drink nonetheless.

As it is, since the late 1800s in the U.S., vote-buyers have had to trust that their voters will stay bought in the voting booth, and that's a mook's game. Consequently, candidates have to work on convincing voters by engaging their brains, or at least their pocketbooks in a less direct and venal way. Or that's the theory, anyway.

You'll notice, of course, that big media hasn't reported this story at all. It's not that they're suppressing it. It's too far down in the weeds for them, they don't know the facts, and they can't be bothered with thirty minutes of Google.

If you have a DailyKos ID, please go recommend the diary containing this piece that I just posted there.

Franken votes

If Al Franken does manage to eke out a nominal win (by a statistically insignificant margin), the turning point will be rejection of a huge number of bullshit challenges from the Coleman campaign in Hennepin County, particularly in Minneapolis itself, where Franken will recover challenged votes at close to a 10 to 1 rate.

I currently show Franken leading, although by a scant 20 votes. That's real votes, not the Star Tribune's simplistic projection. That margin is quick and dirty, and I'm regretting not looking more carefully at factors beyond voter intent. It's just too close to guess.

There's no way this is not going to court.

Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

Back to reality

It doesn't matter what smart people may think about the Franken-Coleman recount. Minnesota is going to decide this election the old-fashioned way. That means more counting and recounting and arguing, in court if necessary, about challenges, excluded absentee ballots, lost ballots, and anything else that might change the outcome by one vote.

In the end, there will only be a few hundred challenged ballots that are hard to call, and we should all be able to sort them out and decide for ourselves. At least, we'll be able to sort out the voter intent. Duplications, invalid ballots, and chain of control won't show up well on the web.

I've been viewing the challenged ballots at the Star Tribune. Yes, I have looked at all 2240 available so far. Sometimes democracy requires sacrifices of personal hygiene, and it's a natural for blogging.

My conclusion: It's a nip and tuck race. Franken is gaining even though most of the challenges from both sides are bullshit (Franken has withdrawn 663 (PDF) of his challenges), but it's an open question whether he'll gain fast enough.

Even so, this race will come down to those excluded absentee ballots. Whether Franken or Coleman will want to check them remains to be seen. I would hope that, should Franken hold the lead, he would continue to argue for their review instead of expediently reversing himself.

The current consensus of other amateur recounters differs significantly from my own assessment. Yes, I have a bias, though I've worked against it. I've also mostly ignored the distinguishing mark problem challenged on both sides. I'm sure that there are a couple of other ballots I should have excluded. For example, I counted the infamous "Lizard People" ballot, and I probably should not have. (My reasoning, by the way: This dude - apparently - wrote "Lizard People" into all the races on the front of the ballot. On every one except the Senate race, he also blacked in the write-in oval. On the Senate race alone, he left the write-in oval blank and blacked the Franken oval.)

Still, the odd thing about the consensus counts at the Star Tribune is that my Franken count is only one vote higher than the consensus. There is no way I could possibly have unfairly excluded thirty-five Coleman ballots.

So, I wonder whether there's some freeping going on in this on-line exercise in what should be transparent democracy.

Note: Minnesota Public Radio has 2702 ballots posted for review.

Random error

Charles Seife raises an important point that I've been batting around in my mind, oh, since Florida 2000. But the nail-biter between Al Franken and Norm Coleman in Minnesota's Senate election has raised this issue back to the front of my brain.

Elections that come down to a couple of hundred ballots out of millions cast are in fact statistical ties. Florida's was a tie (until you get to the overvotes that were never counted). Minnesota's is a tie.

How can we know this? Before the recount began, the state ran a post-election review to gauge the accuracy of the voting process. The review involved auditors going into select precincts and, like the recounters, counting by hand, doing the most careful job humanly possible. So in some precincts, we have not just a recount but a re-recount. Both auditors and recounters were hypervigilant to possible sources of error, and yet they disagree on their tallies by about 20 thousandths of a percent.

In an ordinary race, errors this tiny wouldn’t be a problem. But the Coleman-Franken race is so close that this error rate is more than double the margin between the two camps.

Given the error-prone measurement systems we have - and Minnesota's is relatively good, especially compared to Florida's - no scientist or engineer would ever claim that even the count we get out of a careful, conscientious recount is accurate enough to measure a real difference in voter preference from vote totals that only differ by 0.008%.

Careful what you wish for

I'm beginning to think that Norm Coleman might indeed prevail over Al Franken. The reason? The Star Tribune actually gave me what I wanted - a substantial number of ballots viewable on line and the promise of more.

Being the perseverative procrastinator that I am, this was a perfect way to avoid cleaning out the gutters, so I actually assessed all 598 ballots currently viewable. While my numbers differed from the consensus of other get-a-life idiots by a little, Franken still only netted six votes in my count. That's not fast enough, assuming it's representative. Nate Silver, who started me down this path, agrees.

This election was always going to wind up in court if Franken won. With the decision of the Canvassing Board not to review disqualified absentee ballots, it will also wind up in court if Franken loses.

The best outcome in any case: With a transparent process, the democratically elected winner, as best we can determine, will be seated in the Senate. That in itself is a victory, despite the fact that both sides are wasting a lot of time with bullshit challenges. Florida, of course, is not paying attention.

One other thing is obvious: There are voters on both sides who are wildly incapable of following the simplest instructions. That village in Texas? It's not the only one missing its idiot. There are citizens whose votes have never counted since optical scan voting started. I wonder how they get through the day without dying some gruesome accidental death. Were they sick every time their grade school gave a standardized test? Cripes, people. Nonetheless, even though I muttered "fucking idiot" under my breath with alarming frequency, I tried to find their intent and often did.

As Slappy the Squirrel often says, "That's comedy." Or democracy. Your mileage may vary.

Never mind the will of the voters

Norm Coleman, like Duhbya before him, is visibly willing to ignore what voters want in order to win an election. Essentially, they want the rule to be that Republicans take all statistical ties.

These Republicans don't give the slightest shit about legitimacy or the consent of the governed. This departure from the American democratic consensus is still shocking to me.

A margin of 206 votes among 2.4 million cast is without a doubt not definitive. If we've learned anything from the past decade of election controversies, it's that we do not have voting technology or human organizations that are capable of a low enough error rate to measure at a precision of one vote in 10,000.

The worst feature of our vote-counting systems is that we don't test them at all thoroughly. Every election should include post-vote audits. Some of these audits should recount every ballot. At least then we would know how inaccurate our elections might be.

That would be a good thing for a democracy to know.