If Coleman loses, will he have to climb into a crate with a sex-crazed gorilla?
We can always hope!
Ah! Gorilla my dreams…
Let’s not relive the Jon Grunseth thing.
**
“Franken pushes his lead over Coleman to 249**”
Patty Wetterling…poor Patty Wetterling would not have managed to beat Coleman - she would have liked to try, though.
Ceresi would have liked to try as well - but isn’t a white bread with mayo Lutheran DFLer…
I actually think it’ll be a great thing if he’ll be elected. First off, he’s already recognizable. I don’t think I know more than… What? Two other people by face in the senate. That alone will make what he says clipworthy when it comes to the news (that, and, I’m sure at some point he’ll throw in a light joke).
And rather than the hollywood baggage issue dragging him down I’d say it was the third party, which got a significant portion of the vote.
If Franken is elected, what committees will he join? I imagine that he, unlike Webb and Tester, won’t be on Armed Services, but might he be on Agriculture? (Pity there’s no Entertainment Industry one…)
In a hypothetical two-candidate runoff, would most of the Independence voters go for Franken or Coleman?
The best thing about Franken winning would be the agony it causes to Bill O’Reilly. O’Reilly still hates him for outing a bunch of his lies in that Lying Liars book.
I don’t know why he couldn’t on an armed services or veterans committee. He’s already been an advocate for veterans, he’s been to Iraq and Afghanistan a bunch of times and hes done a ton of USO tours.
That’s not a lot, but it’s more than a lot of people in the Senate.
It’s hard to say. I don’t think it would be overwhelming in either direction. They tend to be fiscally conservative, but a lot of them are social libertarians turned off by the religious right. In a vaccuum, I think they’d probably go slightly more Republican than Democrat, but in this specific case, they mostly can’t stand Coleman. The problem is, they don’t much like Franken either. That’s why Barkley got such a huge “none of the above” vote.
I really don’t think I could call it. I think a lot of them would simply abstain.
IF Franken does win this thing I think he’ll stick around for some time. The whole campaign against him is that he is an indecent, angry, pornographic, violent pornographer who produces juicy porn. After people spend six years getting to know him that will be an impossible campaign to run again.
On the question of if there was a runoff, I think Franken would win by one or two points, which would look like a landslide compared to what we are going to end up in this contest. I also think Humphrey would kill Nixon in a re-vote. And it matters just as much.
No matter who wins the recount I wont believe it is correct. I would be for a re-vote.It has been too long and both sides have people who don’t play nice involved.
Unfortunately, Minnesota law doesn’t allow for a re-vote. We get a recount. In the unlikely event that a tie is the result of all this - they will flip a coin.
sigh This really isn’t going to be settled before the New Year, is it?
Everything is being done in the open. The canvassing board even broadcast it’s meetings for everyone to see. The campaigns were allowed to challenge every ballot they wanted in the hand recount. I don’t think Coleman’s alleged duplication of ballots complaint holds any water, but he’ll get to make his argument in court. The sides are supposed to be hashing out an agreement on how to count wrongly rejected absentee ballots. I don’t see what more could be done to be correct about this. It’s been the opposite of Florida 2000.
So what?
The Senate doesn’t even convene until Jan 6th, 2009.
I’d rather see it being done out in the open, and carefully, then rushed through.
They’re saying the winner will be announced on Jan 5, and that that determination will be final. Whoever it is (and it’s looking more an more like it’s going to be Franken), there hasn’t been anything underhanded or corrupt about the process.
Nate reiterated today that it will be Franken.
I don’t see the Coleman claim in Court about duplicate ballots and original ballots both being counted will be upheld.
These duplicate ballots are mainly from overseas voters (often military) who can pull up their ballot online, print it out, vote on it, and mail it in to the county clerk. Obviously, these come in on all sorts of paper, and generally reduced in size to print on a normal sheet of paper (the actual ballots are much bigger). So for them to be counted by the machines, 2 poll workers (1 from each party) copy the votes from the mailed-in ballot onto a regular paper ballot. They are also supposed to mark them, writing across the top “Original Ballot #xx” and “Duplicate Ballot #xx”. Then the duplicates on the regular ballot paper are fed through the scanners along with all the other ballots.
The original votes, on those mailed-in sheets of paper, are put into an envelope and kept. The duplicate ones are in with the other ballots, in the boxes inside the scanner/counter. Usually they are all together at the top or bottom of the stack, but not always – in one precinct that we recounted, we had to go through the stack of 2000-some ballots to find all the 14 duplicate ballots. There were 8 of them all together, but the other 6 were scattered throughout the stack. But in the end we had all 14 originals, and all 14 duplicates of them, and we only counted them once.
But it seems very unlikely to me that these original ballots could be counted. Even if they hadn’t been marked, they were real obviously, physically different from the other ballots. First they were folded, because they had been mailed in from overseas. And they were printed on lots of different kind of paper, usually a regular-weight printer paper, rather than the heavier weight paper that the ballots are printed on. Finally, they were reduced in size – most were printed on regular letter-sized sheet of paper, not the bigger paper that the ballots were printed on.
Just glancing at them, you could see that they were NOT regular ballots that had gone through the scanner/counter machines. So the chance of them being accidentally included in the recount seems almost impossible – they are obviously different, and every recount had observers from both campaigns there, who would have questioned this.
I just can’t think how the Coleman lawyers will explain a way that any double-counting could have happened.
Possibly their argument is that duplicate ballots should not be counted unless the original ballot is available for comparison, and I suppose it’s possible that some precinct could have the duplicate ballots, but the envelope of the original ballots is lost. (After all, one precinct lost an envelope of their votes from the machine.) But the precedent from that case is that the clerk must use the best info that they have available, in that case the machine count from election day including those now-missing ballots. So in this case, the duplicate ballots are available to be counted. Unless the Coleman lawyers can point to the original ballots and show that they were already counted once, I think it’s likely that the duplicates will have to be counted. So I don’t see this argument prevailing for Coleman, either.