MN Sen Recount (UPDATE: Stuart Smalley certified winner, lawsuit forthcoming)

[tokar]

Here are your pre-recount numbers...

Barkley   437389
Coleman   1211565
Franken   1211359
Aldrich   13916
Niemackl   8908
Write-in   2340
Evan   0
Shepard   0
Price      12
Cavlan   13

And here is your link to the MN results: http://electionresults.sos.state.mn.us/20081104/ElecRslts.asp?M=S&R=S&P=A

Have fun.

[tokar]

Current net change

Barkley +15
Coleman +25
Franken +16

They're sure doing a good job of stealing this election for Franken in the recount right now.

Current margin: 215 votes

its early...the recount is going to take the better part of 2 weeks.

[tokar]

we need to wait at least a day before we can start heralding results...one vote here and there is not changing much.  So far Coleman has decreased by a total of 11 votes...talk about newsworthy *rolls eyes*.

[tokar]

lol voters.

I agree with Engdahl about that one, btw; I don't really see the X (I perceive a "/" fairly well but the other stroke isn't really there).

This is simple yet clear evidence that there are millions of people who have never gone to school and taken a standardized test...

[tokar]

Question:

Does this recount ONLY look at votes for Minnesota Senate and therefore only affect that vote total?  Or will this affect other races as well (e.g. President, house elections, etc.)?

[tokar]

Franken will win this race. The Democrats will make sure of it.

Absolutely, I'm very doubtful that Coleman has enough recount efforts.  There is very little scrutiny, or backlash against Coleman's large loss of votes.  It just doesn't make sense that Coleman would lose ~800 votes before the recount has even started.

he has?

You don't remember when Coleman was leading by 1000 votes after all of the absentees/provisionals were counted?  Cause I do.

this was before some lady in some county saw she entered Franken's vote total incorrectly.  She had entered in "100" when she meant to enter in "1000"...or something like that.

[tokar]

You can see 4 challenged ballots here (click "View full slideshow" on the right)

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/11/19/recountbegins/

some people are really stupid...
1 shows a guy who didnt even mark in the designated area
1 shows a guy who filled in Franken at first, but then pointed an arrow leading from the Franken circle to the Coleman circle
1 shows a guy who marked an X between the circles for Franken and Aldrich

The last is probably from some poll worker who mishandled the ballot and left his/her fingerprint on the ballot.

[tokar]

Just FYI, for those keeping score:  The MN SOS website says Coleman -47 votes, with 23.17% of precincts and 15.49% of votes.  The Star-Tribune says Coleman -34 votes, with 25% of precincts and 17% of votes.  And my counting of the Strib says Coleman -41 votes.  Still haven't counted the SOS yet...

Waiting for these numbers to coalesce around one result...

lol, i had some page open which said "Coleman's lead shrinks by 15%", and it must be on auto-refresh because it now says 20%.

[tokar]

Coleman's campaign is challenging this vote, which was counted for Franken. For the first time in memory, I've found common ground with Norm Coleman. How was this vote possibly cast for Franken?

If you analyze, by weight, the number of pixels which are above the line versus the amount below the line you will see that there are more above than below.

[tokar]

Oh, and on the earlier ballot:

If the mark is touching one guy's oval and not touching your oval and you're arguing that it's your vote based on how many pixels cross the line (lol), you should be out of luck.  

The ballot shouldn't count for anyone.

It was a joke :-D.

[tokar]

OMG OPTICAL SCAN AND PAPER BALLOTS ARE SUUOOO AWEZOME CUZ WE CAN RECOUNT THEM! OMG!

Electronic voting is the only accurate and non-ridiculous way to vote in the 21st century.

After that documentary came out showing the problems with these scanning machines you would figure everyone would change over to electronic voting.

Although, with the "highly reliable" voting machines of Montgomery County, PA, my brother attempted to push the button for John McCain's name just to see if it would let him, and just like in The Simpsons episode, it didn't let him...didn't really matter considering he was voting for Obama anyway.