{"id":25917,"date":"2009-01-02T16:42:52","date_gmt":"2009-01-02T16:42:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/gregladen\/2009\/01\/02\/the-next-step-in-the-frankenco\/"},"modified":"2009-01-02T16:42:52","modified_gmt":"2009-01-02T16:42:52","slug":"the-next-step-in-the-frankenco","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/2009\/01\/02\/the-next-step-in-the-frankenco\/","title":{"rendered":"The Next Step in The Franken-Coleman Senate Race"},"content":{"rendered":"

I live in Minnesota, and our team is the Vikings. So I know something about losing, and from this perspective, I can explain to you what Norm Coleman is doing.
\n
\nFirst, the context. Tomorrow, Saturday, the canvassing board will open and count absentee ballots and add that to the mix. As I demonstrated to you mathematically it is highly unlikely that this will change the current situation, in which Al Franken is ahead<\/a>. To be more exact, the Worst Case Scenario estimate that I made predicts that with 650 or so ballots to open, there is a better than 75% chance that the count will not change enough for the outcome to shift in Coleman’s favor, and that assumes that the bias in as yet uncounted absentee ballots very strongly favors Coleman (which is certainly not true).<\/p>\n

There is some other supreme-courty stuff happening that may cause a change in the number of absentee ballots being counted. Coleman is desperately trying to change the mix as to which ones will be included. He’ll keep adding and subtracting ballots and trying to get the canvassing board to reconfigure the final outcome again and again and again. Regardless, it is most likely that the canvassing board will start the process of counting the absentee votes on Saturday, then finish on Monday, then declare a winner, after which Coleman will pull out additional tricks to try to get the outcome to change in his favor, even after the count is done and he has lost.<\/p>\n

The Republicans in the Senate have vowed to stand in the way of seating Al Franken in the Senate. This their way of saying “Waaaa! Waaaaa! We wanted that seat to be ours!!1 Waaaa!!!!! Waaaaa!!!!” and so on and so forth.<\/p>\n

Anyway, here’s where the Vikings come in. So, imagine the Vikings are playing the Packers and winning, but in the last few minutes of the game they are ahead by only a three points, and the Packers get a field goal. This puts the Packers ahead by one point, and there are only 15 seconds left to play, and the Packers kick to the Vikings.<\/p>\n

Then, something happens. The usual thing. The ball is kicked, it is returned maybe 15 or 20 yards, and the guy is tackled. And the game is over. Or maybe the returning runner gets farther. Or maybe he fumbles it and the Packers recover it. Or whatever. Something happens.<\/p>\n

Ninety Nine out of 100 times the thing that happens is that the Vikings lose because they have just gotten the ball, they have only seconds to play, they are behind, and the amazing play that needs to happen just does not happen.<\/p>\n

But then, one out of a hundred times it does happen. The amazing, unbelievable play occurs and the team that absolutely had to lose the game based on the score and everything instead wins the game.<\/p>\n

So imagine you are the Vikings coach standing there watching this, and your team has just carried out the last play, and you lose. But suddenly everything in the stadium stops moving. You can move, but everything else is frozen in time. And an angel, an angel named Clarance, is suddenly standing behind you and taps you on the shoulder and says “Hey, loser, would you like to win a game for once?”<\/p>\n

And you figure, “Oh, well, whatever” and you tell the angel that yes, you’d like to win this very game in particular, as a matter of fact.<\/p>\n

And the Angel gets it and snaps his fingers and you are back to the beginning of the last play again, and the play happens and you lose again. And once again time stops.<\/p>\n

And the angel hands you one of those little metal cricket chirping clicker thingies that the Nuns used in Catholic School to keep everyone in line. And the Angel says unto you:<\/p>\n

“OK, Bozo, just click this at the end of the play every time you lose, and the whole thing will rerun, and eventually maybe the unbelievable will happen and your team will pull this off. Good luck.:<\/p>\n

Poof. Angel disappears. But you’ve got the clicker.<\/p>\n

So you stand there and click and click and click and click each time watching the play happen, over and over, but different each time but you always lose, and eventually, if this strange dream (or blog post as it were) goes on long enough the unlikely event of the Vikings running the ball back to the goal line on the return happens.<\/p>\n

Then you stop clicking.<\/p>\n

Norm Coleman is the coach. The clicker is the Minnesota Supreme Court, and the Angel is the American Democratic Process.<\/p>\n

Except in real life, the American Democratic Process does not have quite that much patience and is not going to disappear letting this sucker click on the little clickety cricket thingie forever Eventually, maybe Monday, maybe Wednesday, the American Democratic Process is going to slap Norm Coleman up side the head and tell him that enough is enough. You lose. There will not be an infinate set of opportunities for last second do overs.<\/p>\n

And then it’s Welcome to the Senate, Mr. Franken.
\n
\nHere’s an update from MinPost.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I live in Minnesota, and our team is the Vikings. So I know something about losing, and from this perspective, I can explain to you what Norm Coleman is doing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[208,4537,33,306],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5fhV1-6K1","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25917"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25917"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25917\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}