AlterNet: Seat Al Franken Already

[marmar]

Seat Al Franken Already

By Scott Rafferty, AlterNet. Posted February 5, 2009.

Republicans will pay a price for stalling Senator-elect Franken.



The jig has been up for Republican former Sen. Norm Coleman since election night, when the results showed him just 326 votes ahead (out of more than 292,000 ballots). Minnesota is a paper-trail state, and its law explicitly protects voter intent with prolonged procedures. As predicted on AlterNet, Coleman's margin was simply not big enough to protect him from the required manual recount.

Minnesota's modern optical scan machines are astonishingly accurate when the voter completely fills the oval with a black pen. But 7 out of 7 peer-reviewed academic studies confirm that Democrats just do not follow this instruction as well as Republicans. Since the recount tallies any ballot with clear evidence of voter intent, Democratic candidate Al Franken's march to victory was steady -- just as predicted here. The State Canvassing Board, including two Supreme Court justices (and only 1 out of 5 members a Democrat), certified Franken's margin at 225 votes after a hand recount.

Minnesota's modern optical scanners had close to zero counting errors where the voter filled out the oval, as all obedient persons well-trained in taking SATs reliably did. But 6 out of every 10,000 voters didn't follow directions, didn't completely fill in an oval, or made other markings that the machine couldn't be expected to interpret. That's 1,672 ballots that were inspected by hand and interpreted by the Canvassing Board, many of them by less-educated or simply rebellious voters.

History shows Democratic candidates start with a baseline advantage of 60 percent among these votes. Consistent with his slight edge, Franken got 62 percent, for a net gain of 440 votes, switching the outcome. .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/story/125375/seat_al_franken_already_/

[waiting for hope]

1. Coleman needs to suck it up

and walk away - he was screaming for Franken to concede immediately after the election, why can't he follow his own advice? Oh yeah, he's a Puke.

[fasttense]

2. So really the repukes are stopping the seating of Franken.

I guess their beloved leader Oxycotin Rush told them to. Rush is after all, a big fat idiot.