Minnesota Recount Limbo - Original vs Duplicated Ballots
Well curse it if Donald Rumsfeld wasn’t right.
Turns out that there were some unknown unknowns in the MN recount today. (Nate Silver runs us through the known knowns and the known unknowns.)
About the four o’clock hour - and just when the panel thought it might be able to break early before getting a fresh start on Coleman’s challenges tomorrow - the lawyers started wrangling.
At issue is the question of original versus duplicated ballots.
I might be messing this up a bit because it’s complicated and I only had the audio on in the background, but it appears that in MN duplicate ballots can be created by election judges when there is an issue with a voter’s ballot.
From what they were arguing, it seems as though the election judge can fill it out exactly as the voter did in an attempt to get a proper read through the machine.
There appear to be some numbering issues between the original and duplicate ballots. They should all line up, but some have been misnumbered, etc.
This wouldn’t be a problem (because in a standard count, the election judge would make sure that only the duplicates were counted), except that the two campaigns fought vociferously that the original ballots be used for the recount.
(The Board made sure to note that the two campaigns argued for this against the advice of everyone who knows anything about elections in MN).
The upshot is that a poorly numbered duplicate ballot that was successful during the machine count might be counted again as the original during the hand recount.
The Coleman campaign wanted the Canvassing Board to deal with the issue, though they (and Team Franken) argued that it wasn’t really their jurisdiction. The Board is only there to judge the ballots that have been challenged, not to police the actions of individual counties.
The bigger problem is that the Board has already done all the Franken challenges, meaning that any changes to which ballots are under consideration might necessitate going back through those ballots (or at least trying to figure out which ones they are).
It was unclear (at least to me) what kind of numbers we might be talking about here. Five, dozens, hundreds?
And if it is a state-wide problem, the campaign that loses might have a compelling legal argument to start the recount all over again. From the beginning.
If, of course, it is even possible to match up all those original and duplicated ballots.
Instant. Runoff. Voting, people.
[No one else finds this interesting, right?]
Update: The Canvassing Board is going to review this issue today. According to the Strib’s color commentary, it seems like about 150 ballots might have been affected by the original vs duplicate issue.
As they pointed out, the Coleman campaign clearly feels that they were largely Franken double votes, as they’re pushing hard to have them found and dealt with. Team Franken is arging against. Democracy!
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