Breaking: Missing ballots found in Minnesota by Franken camp!

[blueclown]

http://www.startribune.com/politics/national/senate/35074544.html?elr=KArks8c7PaP3E77K_3c::D3aDhUxWoW_oD:EaDUiacyKUnciaec8O7EyU

A new wrinkle is surfacing today in the recount battle in Minnesota between incumbent U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman and challenger Al Franken -- missing ballots.

The Franken campaign today said that it has learned of missing ballots totaling several hundred in various counties. Franken recount attorney Marc Elias said he's also bothered that counties that know they have missing ballots aren't bothering to look for them.

Elias declined to identify those counties but acknowledged that the Franken campaign is monitoring reports of several dozen missing ballots in Becker County.

Officials can determine they have missing ballots whenever they come up with fewer paper ballots than what the electronic Election Night vote total was for the U.S. Senate race.

[Jennicut]

1. Gee, I wonder who hid them?

[Ian David]

2. Franken is going to win, and someone needs to go to jail. n/t

[thoughtcrime1984]

17. Please, let it be so!! nt

[Parche]

3. i hope hannity reports this

[PBS Poll-435]

...

:spray:

HOLYSHIT

:rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl:

[I_Will]

4. Missing...or only ever existed in the software ?

[lisa58]

6. Interesting point - I hope they find out and report it to the world!

[intheflow]

12. That's my guess. n/t

[Samantha]

23. That is what I have been wondering

Who said all those votes for Norm were memorialized via paper? Maybe the numbers were "accidentally" inflated....

Sam

[dflprincess]

5. Becker County?

I believe that's Michelle Bachmann country.

[lisa58]

7. how cool would that be?

[ogneopasno]

8. Hardly. It's in the 7th, Peterson's.

[Bjorn Against]

16. And the seventh Congressional district is the most Republican district in the state

Yes it is represented by a Democrat, but it is one of those situations in which a very red district elects a conservative Democrat. Peterson is pretty much the only Democrat that can win that seat, it is actually more Republican than Bachmann's district.

[dflprincess]

24. Oh duh!

I bet I was thinking of Benton County, that is in the 6th.

Though I did get someone from the coordinated campaign annoyed with me early this year. She was at my senate district meeting and said we had a shot at the DFL talking all 8 Congressional seats and I asked if Peterson had decided not to run. :evilgrin:

[Sebastian Doyle]

9. Wasn't her race close?

And a "surprising win" given her polling numbers in the weeks before the election?

[Botany]

10. Fuck Al Franken

After working the election in Ohio in 2004 and hearing and seeing
election crimes first hand but then Al Franken one of our few national
voices would not say shit .... as a matter of fact he made fun of "conspiracy
people" who thought Ohio was dirty.

"Bitter table for one."

But now he is finding missing ballots and ESS machines that dump his vote ....
:grr:

[volatileblob]

14. You can be pissed at Franken for not looking at Ohio's theft...

But if he wins it will help the the Demz, and the country, compared to Norm Coleman's GOP idiocy.

So, pull for Franken, for America's sake.

[bunny planet]

18. I know, Bot, I said as much today to the folks that called from Franken's

campaign asking for money for lawyers to 'keep another Florida from happening'. I said, 'you mean another Ohio and Florida, don't you'
I want him to win because we need every Senator we can get come January, but Franken definitely pissed me off with his attitude on air after 2004. He could have helped a lot with getting the info out there about Ohio being stolen but he didn't want to jeapardize his chances for running for the Senate in the future. Put this recount in the 'isn't it ironic' file.

[Botany]

19. You got it

Franken made the calculation in 2004 that it would be better
for him in the long run if he "played nice" about Ohio ... I know
some of the people involved w/ the fight here .... no wing nuts ...
and Al wouldn't touch 'em. Such things as runs of 5,000 + votes
in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) that did not have 1 Kerry vote in them.

Al is very smart and good man but his actions after the 2004 have
stained my opinion of him forever. Kinda like John Kerry, the Ohio
Dem party, and the national dem party.

[kestrel91316]

11. "Missing" ballots? Or STOLEN ballots?

[EFerrari]

13. I hope people who feel relaxed because they vote on OpScan (Doug)

are watching this, closely.

We vote on OpScan here.

[AtomicKitten]

15. WTF? I hope Obama has dispatched a cadre of attorneys to Minnesota.

This is getting weirder and weirder.

[progressive_realist]

20. Fewer paper ballots than the electronic total?

I'm shocked, shocked I tell ya...

:sarcasm:

[Tribetime]

21. 6400 absentee ballots to be reviewed tomorrow

they were rejected initially, but a small percentage expected to be allowed in.

[wildflowergardener]

22. Ballots

Wouldn't you think it should be pretty easy to tell how many ballots there should be? I know in our state everyone who signs in to vote gets a number, and they also signed the book. It seems like it would be pretty easy to tell if there is a discrepancy between the number of electronic votes that go through the machine, and the number of voters, in each precinct.

That doesn't explain where the ballots went, but it would help explain how many extra votes might have been to electronic voting machine glitches, and weren't really missing ballots.

Meg

[dflprincess]

25. We also sign in and a count is kept of the number of voters

at the end of the evening the number of ballots fed into the machine are suppose to match the number of voters. Added to that are spoiled ballots which would be defined as those where a voter made a mistake and requested a new ballot.