Wall Street Journal: Franken Stealing Election

Democrats won the White House and increased their majorities in the Senate and House, but “some in their party wouldn’t mind adding to their jackpot by stealing a Senate seat for left-wing joker Al Franken.” That’s the thrust of an editorial in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal about the still unresolved race between Franken and incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman in Minnesota. On the morning after Election Day, Republican Coleman led Franken by 725 votes. By that evening, his lead had shrunk to 477, and as of Tuesday, the margin was just 206 votes. “This lopsided bleeding of Republican votes is passing strange considering that the official recount hasn’t even begun,” the Journal observed. It’s not unusual that state officials, in double-checking the initial election results, would find and fix errors. What is unusual is that nearly every “fix” has gone in favor of Franken. In one case, Minnesota’s director of elections announced on Friday, three days after the election, that she had forgotten to count 32 absentee ballots in her car. In Two Harbors, a liberal outpost near Duluth, Franken picked up an additional 246 votes, while none of the other contests in that precinct recorded any changes in their vote total. “According to conservative statistician John Lott, Mr. Franken’s gains so far are 2.5 times the corrections made for Barack Obama in the state, and nearly three times the gains for Democrats across Minnesota Congressional races,” The Journal reported. The newspaper notes that the post-election process is being overseen by Democratic Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, an ally of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), “of fraudulent voter-registration fame.” Franken and fellow Democrats are now pushing to turn what should be a straightforward recount of existing legal ballots into a “complete do-over,” pressuring election officials into accepting tossed ballots, according to The Journal, which concludes: “With their party only three Senate seats from the 60 needed to break a filibuster (and two still not decided), Democrats have a political incentive to cut corners to steal a seat if they can get away with it… “If Minnesota wants to retain its reputation as a state with clean elections, it needs to run an honest recount.” By: Jim Meyers © 2008 Newsmax