Posted on 07/01/2009 1:18:15 PM PDT by Robert A. Cook, PE
The Minnesota Supreme Court yesterday declared Democrat Al Franken the winner of last year's disputed Senate race, and Republican incumbent Norm Coleman's gracious concession at least spares the state any further legal combat. The unfortunate lesson is that you don't need to win the vote on Election Day as long as your lawyers are creative enough to have enough new or disqualified ballots counted after the fact.
Mr. Franken trailed Mr. Coleman by 725 votes after the initial count on election night, and 215 after the first canvass. The Democrat's strategy from the start was to manipulate the recount in a way that would discover votes that could add to his total. The Franken legal team swarmed the recount, aggressively demanding that votes that had been disqualified be added to his count, while others be denied for Mr. Coleman.
But the team's real goldmine were absentee ballots, thousands of which the Franken team claimed had been mistakenly rejected. While Mr. Coleman's lawyers demanded a uniform standard for how counties should re-evaluate these rejected ballots, the Franken team ginned up an additional 1,350 absentees from Franken-leaning counties. By the time this treasure hunt ended, Mr. Franken was 312 votes up, and Mr. Coleman was left to file legal briefs.
What Mr. Franken understood was that courts would later be loathe to overrule decisions made by the canvassing board, however arbitrary those decisions were. He was right. The three-judge panel overseeing the Coleman legal challenge, and the Supreme Court that reviewed the panel's findings, in essence found that Mr. Coleman hadn't demonstrated a willful or malicious attempt on behalf of officials to deny him the election. And so they refused to reopen what had become a forbidding tangle of irregularities.
(Excerpt) Read more at boortz.com ...
This is now the second time Republicans have been beaten in this kind of legal street fight. In 2004, Dino Rossi was ahead in the election-night count for Washington Governor against Democrat Christine Gregoire. Ms. Gregoire's team demanded the right to rifle through a list of provisional votes that hadn't been counted, setting off a hunt for "new" Gregoire votes. By the third recount, she'd discovered enough to win. This was the model for the Franken team.
Mr. Franken now goes to the Senate having effectively stolen an election. If the GOP hopes to avoid repeats, it should learn from Minnesota that modern elections don't end when voters cast their ballots. They only end after the lawyers count them.
This country is beginning more and more to resemble a particularly corrupt banana republic.
Republicans are cowards.
Unfortunately this has been going on for a long time.
“Landslide” Lyndon John in Duvall County TX did it with the help of George Pharr. (1948)
It is still a crime, but they never seem to be called into question on this.
—
Here is an explantion if you want to read it. I did not learn of this from this article:
http://blogs.chron.com/leonhale/2008/07/everything_looks_great_from_up_1.html
That race ended with Stevenson nursing a lead of a little over a hundred votes when a box in Jim Wells County mysteriously showed up six days late containing 202 ballots, 201 of which were for Johnson, giving him an 87 vote victory. Hence the nickname Landslide Lyndon. It was claimed later that most of those 202 ballots were from dead persons.
What was so amazing was not that the dead voted, but that they voted in alphabetical order!
The votes had allegedly been delivered by the Parr political machine in Duval and Jim Wells counties.
I wish Norm would have taken the fight to the USSC.
NOT that he’s a great candidate, but for future candidates that may be.
That said, had the GOP run a unabashed conservative against Weird Al, the public would have been given a real choice with a real difference.
Eventually, when people begin to feel like they can't get fairness and justice through a democratic process, they turn to other means. That's how Revolutions begin.
Speaking of stepdaughter-marrying pedophiles...
Except that these were the same court that rejected Coleman's attempts to stop the counting, claiming that his arguments were better suited to the contest phase.
It now appears that the game is to kick the can to the contest phase, and then in the contest phase say that it's too late because votes were counted.
-PJ
-PJ
Woody should get an honorary degree from Duke.
I hope that the National GOP wasn't advising Coleman because if they were they truly do not understand Socialist Democrats.
Yeh -- probably already has several from Notre Dame or Georgetown.
Another day, another stolen election. Yawn. It’s become commonplace. So commonplace that no one really cares anymore. I’m waiting for the big one though. I want to see how Obama manages to steal his second term and then overturn the constitution so he can have a third. That’s the political Superbowl!
Johnson was also assisted by Harry Truman and Abe Fortas. I read Cato’s book about LBJ and it struck me that he might have been the crookedest person in the country.
*ping* for later - thanks for posting!
Let’s not forget sen. burris from IL. A corrupt senator from a corrupt state appointed by a corrupt governor. “zero” was up to his eyeballs in that conspiracy but it’s been buried and will never see the light of day.
No, he did lose the election by only winning the first time by 725! What does this say about Coleman? What does this say about what his views are that this election was this close to begin with! He did get jobbed but it should have never been that close in the first place.
When I was growing up, a good friend of my family was the Assistant Attorney General under several administrations. That was back in the days when there were NO Republicans in Texas, all Democrat. He loathed Lyndon, and I heard it all about him.
Another family friend was a bookkeeper for George Pharr. He never talked. There is another story that is attached with this friend, that I will not post here.
Your accessment of what Lyndon was, is accurate.
Votes suddenly found! Reminds me of that Morgan silver dollar ad.
The problem is lawyers cost money. The lawyers are notoriously left leaning, and they keep coming at you until you run out of money. Throw in the mix a stream of George Soros money, and unless you have a right leaning George Soros type to throw in matching funds.
(To finish my thought) ....You lose.
I like Norm as a person, I even liked him as mayor when I lived in St.Paul.
As a senator, not so much:
voted for bailout
voted against drilling
waffled to and fro on shamnesty
ethanol cheerleader...
Stalinists rule over us now! Time to 'Restore the Republic'!
Nam Vet
President Obortion's response to charges of "irregularities" in his Illinois days was, to paraphrase, he would "do whatever is necessary to get on with the peoples' business".
In plain English, "the ends justify the means, as long as the ends are the ones Democrats want".
So true - But Lyndon was a democrat, “selected” not elected by Kennedy (may He ever be praised as a saint! ) who himself stole the 1960 election from Nixon based on illegal Chicago IL ballots.
So, today, lest St Kennedy ever be mentioned despairingly, we never hear of the Kennedy theft. The Kennedy corruption, mismanagement, drugs, sex scandals, or ghostwriting...
He was never popular in Texas. Even amoung Dems.
East Coast arrogance never was well received in “good old boy” country. Much of Texas is still that way.
Some of the wealthiest ranchers I knew were the least pretentious people around. Watt Matthews, like his family, ranched all his life in Throckmorton County, meet him on the street and he was another ranch hand by appearance. He was educated at Princeton. Smart man. I fished some of his river as a kid. Really liked him. All his neighbors did too. That family was some of the earliest settlers.
Old Family- respectable, honest and unpretentious.
That is how it should be.
I worked for two such families in my 35 years in the Hardware Distribution business. Very different families but both honest, respectable and successful. One from Texas and the other family was based in Kansas.
Not at all like our arrogant new “leadership” /sarcasm.
Regards,
TF
Gregoire stole the election because the GOP law firm hire to contest the election was in t he back pocket of Gregoire and the Democrats. Davis Wright Tremaine (DWT) hired Gary Locke after he left office.
Don’t you find it interesting that DWT “forgot” to allege vote fraud in its initial complaint? Everyone knew there was vote fraud, yet DWT “inadvertently” missed that cause of action? Who could possibly believe that?
Besides that, Rossi had absolute proof of racketeering crimes committed by Gregoire and the WA Supreme Court yet refused to use that information because it would have also implicated some very powerful Republicans and their associates.
Yep, and the Dim's play it well.
When Coleman was ahead after the election the rant was "EVERY VOTE MUST COUNT", when Franken finally stole the election and took the lead the rant changed to "WE NEED A SENATOR AND THIS POLITICAL BICKERING MUST END FOR THE GOOD OF THE VOTERS".
They followed exactly the same game plan used to steal the governorship in Washington.
No time to look at the fact there are more votes than voters when "the people's work" is waiting---as long the the Democrat as those mysterious votes are for the Democrat candidate.
When you're right and the opposition is wrong, the ends justify the means.
At least that's how President Obortion essentially brushed off claims of impropriety regarding his elections during his Illinois days.
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