At home Friday morning--I'm on family leave from work on account of the birth, on Nov. 16, of daughter Claire Beth Jorgenson (8 lbs, 8 oz; ten fingers and toes; a mouth and nose, eyes and ears, all right where you'd expect them to be)--I heard MPR report that Crazy Tom Emmer had called a press conference for 10:30. I thought: Oh no, he's going to concede the election and prove that he's not as crazy as I've been saying!
Not to worry. He isn't quitting, he's switching to a different mode of craziness. His plan had been to challenge, during the manual recount, the validity of ballots cast for his opponent, DFLer Mark Dayton, who according to the election-night count had defeated Emmer by around 8800 votes. But these challenges were deemed "frivolous" by local election officials, and, when examples of the challenged ballots were printed in the newspaper and put up on the Web, the community of sane people became disgusted with the tactics of Team Emmer, which, as Justice Paul Anderson of the Minnesota Supreme Court and member of the State Canvassing Board pointed out, amounted to a thinly veiled effort to disenfranchise Dayton voters. The new strategy is to withdraw the challenges and renew the claim, already rejected by the State Supreme Court, that local election officials failed to reconcile the number of voters with the number of ballots cast.
The new old strategy is superior in the respect that it is not subject to eloquent rebuttal merely by showing examples of challenged ballots that are plainly marked for Dayton. Instead, Team Emmer is darkly suggesting, without any evidence, that ballots that were not marked by a legal voter are being counted because local election officials are not following the law.
When I show up at my polling place on Election Day, I sign a roster and am presented with a receipt. Farther down the line, I turn in the receipt to a different election worker, who hands me a ballot. After marking the ballot, I feed it into a machine and yet another election worker smiles and gives me an "I voted" sticker. State law requires that at the end of the day these election workers verify that the number of ballots matches the number of voters. Some precincts do this by matching ballots to signatures (the letter of the law); others, by matching ballots to receipts, which is faster, more accurate, and permitted by administrative rule.
Emmer has spoken of "an assault on American voting laws" but it is hard to tell what exactly he means. That some precincts failed to perform any kind of reconciliation? There is no evidence this is true. That the administrative rule is illegitimate and that the much more difficult task of reconciling ballots with signatures has to be performed? There is no reason to believe this would result in a more accurate count. Besides, any difference, from either a failure to reconcile or a reconciliation by receipts instead of by signatures, would be at the margins, and Emmer was outpolled by almost 9000 votes.
The loose, bombastic talk about "an assault on American voting laws" is irresponsible and should be understood as just another instance of the paranoid style in American politics. There is one explanation of the election-night result, now confirmed by the manual recount, that does not depend upon a corrupt election system, outlaw election officials, and a conspiracy against the GOP that nevertheless did not prevent Republicans from making large gains in the state legislature:
Dayton won the election. He got around 8800 more votes than anyone else. Instead of wasting our time and money, Tom Emmer should shut up and go away.
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