John Emerson On The Minnesota Election

John Emerson's Response

Coleman was never ahead by more than about 700 votes, and that was an unofficial election night phone-in report done for the benefit of the media. About 99% of the time the unofficial report tells you who won, but not in very close elections like this one.

The mistakes favored Franken on the net, but not all of them. Some mistakes favored Coleman, but more favored Franken. This was true at every stage. Between the unofficial election night total and today, the total swing was less than a thousand votes out of 2.9 million, or about 0.03%. That's a tiny number and in the same range as most statewide races. Lott was misinformed.

No ballots were mysteriously found in the trunk of a car. The first day, in one county one small group of ballots from remote areas was separated from the others and added in a day late. It was never lost and there was a documented chain of custody.

Mistaken rejections of absentee ballots: Minnesota has 87 counties and many more than a thousand precincts. Elections take place every two years and Workers are volunteers or at least very low paid. Mistakes get made, especially on absentee ballots which require special handling and used to be very rare in many precincts. (Absentee ballots is one area where I think procedures will be changed and instructions made clearer).

At least a month ago Franken asked that, as part of the recount, absentee ballots be looked at to see if they were wrongly rejected, and the election board and Supreme Court supported him. They might have been counted earlier except that Coleman slowed the process with a lawsuit.

The reason the recount took so long was because this was the legal process in Minnesota -- the earliest it would have been finished was Dec. 19. This recount was required by law and was not called by Franken. Maybe it bored people but recounts aren't entertainment event, and there wasn't any hurry because no Senator would have been seated before Jan 3 anyway. Care was taken to do things right, and consideration was given to county officials who had other things to do besides count ballots. But from today on out, any delay will be caused by Coleman's lawsuits and Cornyn's filibuster.

Nobody was enthusiastic about the Supreme Court's ruling requiring both candidates to approve one at a time the counting of the absentee ballots which the local boards had decided was wrongly rejected. (One justice did dissent: Justice Alan Page, the NFL Hall of Famer who went into law). But that's what the court said, and they're the boss. I don't think that anyone claims that the Court's decision was pro Franken or pro Colemen; just sort of lame and overcautious.

For the record, Minnesota is a reliably Democratic State only for Presidential elections. In the last 30 years we've had more Republican Senators than Democratic Senators, and we haven't had a Democratic Governor for 18 years.

Minnesotans are proud of the state's reputation for clean politics, and in my opinion nothing has happened to change that. My guess is that you've been relying on bad sources. (Bad sources that I know of include Lott, Coulter, Hannity, Limbaugh, NRO, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page).

The conservative Powerline blog is located in Minnesota, and they've been much more restrained in what they've been saying than the national conservative spokesmen have been. I don't read them regularly and can't promise that I'll agree with everything they say, but that's one place I'd look.

John Emerson

Reference :
OPNTalk - John Emerson, Franken Supporter, Sees Nothing Wrong