The recount in the Minnesota Governor’s race is almost done. As of yesterday evening, only five counties had counting to do. The state “canvassing board” (in charge of the recount, headed by the Secretary of State), is scheduled to meet on December 8th to resolve the recount. That may get done in one day, but is more likely to take about three days. Because there will be lawyers for both sides there and a state supreme court judge on the board who seems bent on dragging out the process (in my humble opinion).
So, how’s it going? Well, in order to know how it is going, you have to know how it works.
Ballots have already been counted once by machines. That gives us (for our present purposes) two numbers, call them X and Y. X and Y differ by less than one half percent, thus the automatic recount.
Then, the ballots are all counted by hand. This gives us, say, XH and YH. If the machines were perfect and the hand count was perfect, X = XH and Y = YH.
However, as the recount proceeds, representatives of X and Y candidate challenge ballots, and those ballots are taking out of the counting process. Let’s call them YC for Y Challenged (presumably challenged by X’s representatives) and XC.
Assume, again, that the machines and hand methods are identical, perfect, and thus would come up with the same exact results. If so, then
X = XH – XC
and
Y = YH – YC
What is happening now is that both X and Y have picked up some extra votes, which is probably the case of counters spotting ballots voting for X or Y that the machine missed. that is a fairly likely form of error.
It is interesting to note that the number of such errors is fewer this year than during the Franken-Coleman recount, as is the number of wacky ballots. Remember the Lizard People wrte-in, and the other crazy cases? There are far fewer this year. Why? The word on the street is that people realized that if they messed with their ballots, the would lose their votes.
Anyway, the point here is that we can’t really evaluate the recount … the values or meaning of the hand counted and presuably more correct ballots, YH and XH because some of those ballots have been put in the challenge pile.
So far, Emmer’s people have been challenging ballots at a rate about 500% higher than Dayton’s people, but here is no evidence that any of these challenges are more valid. In fact, a review of the ballots challenged by Emmer shows that they are utterly bogus in almost all cases. In other words, close to 100% of the votes in the challenged by emmer pile are Dayton votes, and this is a large pile.
Therefore, the fact that at present both candidates have increased their number of votes slightly, with Dayton increasing his number more than emmer, MUST mean that the final count will have Dayton increasing his lead much more than Emmer will increase his lead, simply because so many more of Dayton’s votes have been temporarily removed from the hand count.
It is very likely that Dayton’s lead of 8,755 votes will expand, probably to well past 9,000 votes.
I’ve looked at a lot of the challenged ballots. Some are pretty tricky. Some have two candidates marked, plain and simple. You can’t possibly decide which candidate the voter meant, and such a ballot has to be rejected. One ballot had every single bubble circle circled. Others are more difficult. What happens when two candidates’ bubbles are filled in, but one has an X through it? Even stranger are the challenges in one county which included votes for Horner, a third party candidate. Neither of the leading candidate’s bubbles were even a little filled in. The vote challengers in that county were unclear on the concept.
My impression is that about half of the challenges will be easily settled for one candidate or another, and that these are mostly Dayton votes (meaning that Emmer challengers made a number of bogus challenges that got past the “frivolity” test), and the remainder may be just tossed out.
There is a difference between the candidates in their approach to this process. In a letter sent by Dayton Attorney Marc Elias Dayton’s side proposed the withdraw of the fifty or so ballot challenges deemed “frivolous” by the election officials, calling for the canvassing board to end this fiasco. In an interview with Emmer attorney Trimble, Trimble clearly implies that by hook or crook they would make sure that there would be thousands of challenges so there would be enough to force the canvassing board into action.
For their part, the canvassing board will meet today, December 3rd, at 2:00 PM.
Heads may roll.
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Whose heads and why? I’m not familiar with U.S. voting procedures.
These lawyers both promised that they would not be trying to “stuff the ballot box” as it were with “presumptive” or “automatic” or otherwise frivolous challenges. As it is, the Republicans did something even worse than expected in one county: Every ballot that met two conditions: a) A vote for the Dem and b) a write in for any candidate was challenged. No good reason for that, but they did it.
These lawyers promised that this would not happen, the tribunal in charge warned them, and here the Republicans are doing it anyway. They are in contempt.
Ah. Then I hope that all the costs for the recount are charged against their party.
I think that the Republicans are trying to replicate their Norm Coleman success: by unreasonably prolonging the recount process, they managed to delay the start of an effective Democratic Senate and minimize its total effective period.
Politics in Minnesota just keeps getting crazier and nastier. I think it started with Michelle Bachmann’s first election to public office – the crazy is contagious.