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Anyone following the recount has no doubt heard the bluster and bravado regularly coming from the Al Franken campaign. However, in recent days, Franken and his Washington legal team have seemed awfully desperate for a campaign that is trying to convince people they are winning. They have now tried to shove Al Franken onto the Senate floor through three separate venues – only be to be rebuffed and delayed because their effort clearly violates Minnesota law. Why, if they claim to have a lead, are they so desperately anxious to put Al Franken in a Senate seat? Simple: They know...

A special judges panel held its first meeting with campaign lawyers today, a day after DFLer Al Franken and Republican Norm Coleman dueled over how broad Coleman's legal challenge to the U.S. Senate recount should be and how long it should take. After the closed-door meeting in St. Paul, attorneys for both campaigns said the three-judge panel is likely to issue an order later today saying when the trial will begin and what the schedule will be. They also said a hearing will be held Wednesday at which the panel will consider Franken's motion to dismiss Coleman's lawsuit. One of...

Al Franken filed a petition with the Minnesota Supreme Court … that’s a bit like a bank robber stopping on his way out the door to ask the teller for a receipt.” That’s how an e-mail appeal for funds from the campaign of former U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman described today’s legal move by the Al Franken campaign that asked the state’s high court to order the governor to issue an election certificate. In another response, Coleman attorney Fritz Knaak told reporters that Franken has gone beyond the “epitome of arrogance … [by] asking to go above the laws of our...

FOX "The O'Reilly Factor"Video: "Minnesota Madness" Segment Aired Friday, January 9, 2008       Bill and two Republican guests(1) discuss Hollywood’s and George Soros massive donations to elected “Porn-o-Rama” Franken. This includes, a rare and calculated move(2), by George Soros who personally held a large post-election Franken fundraiser at his residence in New York City to support Al in the ballot recount/contest(3). I wrote about and published the list of Hollywood/high profile Franken donors three days before this news piece, not that this was new Soros Shadow Party news for anyone that has closely followed/been involved in this Coleman-Franken fiasco....

- - Former GOP MN secretary of state says absentee ballots should not have been included in recount Former Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer is now criticizing the handling of the U.S. Senate election recount in the race between Democrat Al Franken and Republican Norm Coleman that ended with Franken on top. Kiffmeyer, R-Big Lake, now a freshman state representative from District 16B, did not speak publicly about the recount while it was ongoing, but is willing to talk about it now that the results are certified and the dispute has moved into the courts. Kiffmeyer, who from 1999 to...

George Soros is the biggest sugar daddy of the Democratic Party, and naturally wants to ensure that the Democrats have a monopoly of power in America. Recently, I wrote an article for American Thinker on the role that George Soros has played in helping the Democrat Al Franken in his race against the Republican incumbent Norm Coleman for a Senate seat in Minnesota. However, there may be one other reason that Soros was determined that Norm Coleman in particular lose his seat. This was personal. Norm Coleman was the chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and as...

Send in the Clown It sounds like the plot of a 1990s straight-to-video Hollywood flick, but barring any dramatic developments – such as a successful court challenge by Republican opponent Norm Coleman – former “Saturday Night Live” cast member and comedian Al Franken will become the next U.S. Senator from Minnesota, likely on the strength of fraudulent votes. Franken’s fitness for office has been a matter of debate ever since he announced his candidacy in February 2007. Having made a career of “debunking” provocative statements made by famous conservatives in books like Rush Limbaugh Is a Big, Fat Idiot, The...

The highly publicized vote recount in the Minnesota Senate race between Democrat Al Franken and Republican Norm Coleman is shining a light on Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, the state’s chief election officer. Ritchie is chairman of the Minnesota Canvassing Board, which on Monday certified that Franken received 225 more votes than Coleman did. Ritchie gave partial credit for his 2006 election to a liberal 527 group, the Secretary of State Project, which says its goal is to “ensure fair, clean elections” by replacing conservative secretaries of state with liberal Democrats. “I want to thank the Secretary of State...

Bond is the third Republican Senator to leave the chamber in 2010 -- following Sens. Sam Brownback (Kans.) and Mel Martinez (Fla.) down that path. Democrats are expected to heavily target all three seats. Bond's retirement ends a long -- and, at times, rocky -- career in Missouri politics that began more than four decades ago when he ran and lost a race for Congress. In 1970, Bond bounced back to be elected state auditor and two years after that was elected governor of the Show Me State. In 1976 he was defeated for re-election but in 1980 reclaimed the...

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin might have a tougher time than once thought if she were to take on Sen. Lisa Murkowski in a Republican primary next year. A Dittman Research poll shows Murkowski leading this year’s GOP vice presidential nominee in the hypothetical matchup, 57-33, according to KTUU-TV in Anchorage.

Dear Supporter, As you may have read or heard by now, today the Minnesota State Canvassing Board met and made their determination in the U.S. Senate Recount, effectively proving that the only declaration coming today is one of an inaccurate count. There are a number of problems with the total certified today, including double counted votes, over 650 potentially wrongly rejected absentee votes, resulting in the disenfranchising of Minnesota voters and jeopardizing the integrity of Minnesota's election system. Harry Reid and national Democrats have now publicly said they will try to seat Al Franken tomorrow when the 111th Congress convenes...

Sheldon Alberts on Roland Burris: 'I am the junior senator, according to every law book in the nation'So, let's review the file on Roland Burris, the fellow Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich appointed last week to replace Barack Obama as the next junior senator from Illinois. He has not held an elected office since 1995. He failed in three bids to become the Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Illinois, and once failed to become mayor of Chicago. Now, he has been appointed to the Senate by a no-shame governor facing corruption charges and allegations he hoped to sell the very Senate seat...

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) threatened Friday to filibuster any attempt to seat Democratic Minnesota Senate candidate Al Franken next week. The newly minted National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) chairman said he had not whipped votes in the GOP caucus, but added that he could not imagine any members defecting and seating Franken without a certificate of election. Franken will not have that certificate as long as the election is challenged in the courts — a likely scenario, with Sen. Norm Coleman’s (R-Minn.) legal team already attacking the credibility of the recount process.

The top Senate Republican said his caucus would block any attempt to seat Democrat Al Franken until an anticipated court case over Minnesota's close election is finished and an official election certificate is conferred. Texas Sen. John Cornyn said Friday that Republicans would object to seating the race leader Franken sooner. A filibuster would require 60 votes to break — a few more than Democrats currently hold in Washington.

Denver Public Schools superintendent Michael Bennet is expected to be named Saturday as the future U.S. Senate replacement for Interior Secretary nominee Ken Salazar, according to two Democratic sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Gov. Bill Ritter is expected to name his U.S. Senate replacement pick on Saturday, ending a brief but frenzied period of speculation about who will take the seat of Interior Secretary nominee Ken Salazar. The selection would be preliminary, since Salazar is not expected to resign his U.S. Senate seat until sometime after Jan. 15, when he faces a confirmation hearing — and later...

Minnesota State Canvassing Board review of challenged ballots in the U.S. Senate race HERE

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) The Minnesota Supreme Court is getting involved in the state's unsettled U.S. Senate race. The court said Monday it will weigh whether to stop the sorting and counting of wrongly rejected absentee ballots until clear instructions are handed down. Republican Sen. Norm Coleman petitioned the court to step in after the state board overseeing the recount recommended those ballots be considered last week. Coleman maintains there aren't clear guidelines for the recommendation and could lead to disarray among the 87 counties.

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) - Democrat Al Franken got good news Friday in his bid for the Senate, winning favorable rulings from a state elections board on rejected absentee ballots and the tally in one of his strongholds. The Canvassing Board overseeing the race recount recommended that county election boards sort and count wrongly rejected absentee ballots. The five-member panel also urged that a recount in one University of Minnesota area precinct be based on Election Night tapes from a ballot counting machine. The recount there, where results favor Franken, ended with 133 missing ballots that could be counted if...

The recount has swung back and forth between the two men, with batches of uncounted ballots being discovered here and there as well as clerical errors changing the totals. With the recount virtually complete on Friday, Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie said Coleman led Franken by 787 votes. Local newspapers put Coleman's margin at about 200 votes, tallying ballots that had previously been challenged.

With all but one precinct re-counted in the Minnesota Senate race, Franken campaign attorney Marc Elias is claiming Franken leads Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) by four votes. The number from Franken's internal tally does not include the Minneapolis precinct where 133 ballots went missing. The Franken count includes the thousands of disputed ballots that both campaigns objected to during the recount process.

The U.S. Senate recount neared its final hours Thursday, buffeted by the kinds of disputes over missing ballots and challenged ballots that have become familiar in the month since the post-election drama began. Yet at day's end, with 99 percent of the ballots counted, the gap separating Republican Sen. Norm Coleman and Democrat Al Franken was only 36 votes larger than it had been at the start. Coleman now leads by 251, according to Star Tribune tabulations. As on Wednesday, the case of 133 missing ballots in Minneapolis held center stage. The city's top election official said she did not...

Al Franken’s campaign claims it now holds a 22-vote lead in the U.S. Senate race with just 138,000 votes left to be recounted. This figure contrasts with other tabulations, based on numbers from the Minnesota Secretary of State’s Office, that show Coleman maintaining a 303-vote lead. The Franken numbers differ in a couple of respects from the SOS data. Most importantly the Democratic camp’s vote tally relies on the call made by local election officials in determining which candidate an individual intended to support. By contrast the other tallies don’t take into consideration the roughly 6,000 ballots that have been...

Take it to the bank.

The polls close in ten minutes. Hopefully Georgia has held the line today. Poll traffic was reported as steady here Northeast Atlanta today...

Today’s Senate runoff between Jim Martin and Saxby Chambliss has drawn national attention in large part because of the possibility that a Martin victory would give Democrats 60 seats in the Senate, enough to close off filibusters. However, Sen. Jim Martin would become that 60th vote only if Sen. Al Franken became the 59th. And that seems highly unlikely. Franken has fallen behind by more than 300 votes in the Minnesota Senate recount (although the Franken camp claims the real margin is less than 80), with less than 10 percent of the votes still to be recounted. According to The...

Former U.S. representative and current Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum (R) said he will “seriously consider” running to replace Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) in 2010. “At this point, my plan is — at the appropriate time — to announce my intention to seek reelection as Florida’s attorney general,” McCollum said in a statement Tuesday following an announcement from Martinez that he would not seek a second term. “However, given today’s development, I will seriously consider and discuss with my family a race for this U.S. Senate seat, and we will share our decision at a later date.” McCollum said he...

The hand recount of Minnesota Senate ballots is in its final week, but the results are likely to be inconclusive. The declaration of a winner will be on hold until thousands of disputed ballots are sorted out. By Friday, all of the state's 87 counties should be done with their collective review of 2.9 million ballots. A five-member board will gather beginning Dec. 16 to rule on ballot challenges made by Republican Sen. Norm Coleman and Democratic challenger Al Franken. As of Monday night, Coleman was up 344 votes when Nov. 4 and recounted numbers from precincts are put side...

Minnesota Senate candidate Al Franken's campaign says it may appeal to the U.S. Senate or the courts because it believes that up to 1,000 absentee ballots were improperly disqualified in the state's recount of votes, The Hill reports. "Wherever the numbers stand todayÂ…that number simply cannot be relevant if it does not include all the votes that were legally cast," Franken attorney Marc Elias said, according to the newspaper. "No recount can be considered accurate or complete until all the ballots cast by lawful voters are counted." Franken trails Republican rival Norm Coleman by 282 votes with most of the...

Al Franken’s (D) campaign may ask the Democratic-led Senate to intervene on his behalf to allow some disqualified absentee ballots to be counted in his quest to unseat Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.). Franken attorney Marc Elias made the case to reporters Monday that as many as 1,000 absentee ballots were improperly disqualified and that the Senate or the courts may need to step in to resolve the issue. “No recount can be considered accurate or complete until all the ballots cast by lawful voters are counted,” Elias said of the recount that became necessary when only about 200 votes separated...

Clicking on the link and then registering for the website will allow you to view and vote for yourself on ballots which have been challenged by either campaign.

The recount is around 88% complete with Coleman ahead in the official tally by 282 votes. At the same time, there are 5,623 ballots which have been challenged by one or the other campaign, and these ballots are removed - temporarily - from the official tally. Therefore the 282 vote lead is not very meaningful; what matters is the dispensation of the challenged ballots. For example, if these challenged ballots break 52.6% to 47.4% in favor of Franken, he wins. Note also that the vast majority of challenged ballots will go against the candidate making the challenge. That's because most...

The setback at the Canvassing Board has forced Al Franken to face the fact that he didn’t get enough valid votes to beat Norm Coleman in Minnesota’s Senate Race. With the rejection of his bid to get the panel to add in thousands of rejected absentee ballots, there seems little chance that the remaining 15% of ballots left in the recount will produce the kind of change that 85% has not. What’s a surly, self-absorbed DFL candidate to do?Sue: Minnesota’s U.S. Senate showdown is veering down a path toward the courts and possibly the Senate itself after a panel’s ruling...

ST. PAUL - Hours after the Franken campaign failed to convince the Minnesota State Canvassing Board to intervene on its behalf, Senate President Harry Reid (D-Nev) supported Franken's attorney's statement that they are prepared to take the Minnesota election to the U.S. Senate for a decision. According to comments published by Talking Points Memo, Franken's lead recount attorney, Marc Elias, said: "There are a number of ways this can happen, whether it is at the county level, before the state canvassing board, before the courts of Minnesota, or before the United States Senate, we do not know," said Elias --...

The Coleman campaign has just issued the following press release that confirms the nightmare scenarios sketched out by John Fund in his Wall Street Journal column today: ST. PAUL - Hours after the Franken campaign failed to convince the Minnesota State Canvassing Board to intervene on its behalf, Senate President Harry Reid (D-Nev) supported Franken's attorney's statement that they are prepared to take the Minnesota election to the U.S. Senate for a decision. Later Wednesday afternoon, Reid opened the door for Senate intervention into the Minnesota election processing, saying: "Today's decision by the Minnesota Canvassing Board not to count certain...

A loyal family friend was appointed to Vice President-elect Joe Biden’s vacant Senate seat Monday as an apparent placeholder until Beau Biden can inherit it upon his return from active duty in Iraq. In one of her final acts in office, Delaware Gov. Ruth Ann Minner (D) selected Ted Kaufman, a longtime adviser and former chief of staff to the elder Biden, to be the state’s next senator. Biden (D) won election as Barack Obama’s vice presidential running mate but was simultaneously reelected to the Senate on Nov. 4. As he cannot take both jobs, there has been intense speculation...

ATLANTA | Democrat Jim Martin is campaigning feverishly, aided by Barack Obama's grass-roots organization from the presidential race and a flood of support from the national party, but he remains an underdog against incumbent Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss in a Georgia runoff election considered pivotal for the balance of power in the U.S. Senate. Mr. Martin is behind in polls, has half the cash of his opponent and early-voting turnout among black voters is stagnating - a crucial block for any Democrat in this mostly conservative state where Republicans also hold the other U.S. Senate seat, the governor's office and...

A discrepancy over the number of ballots in a box and the number recorded on a computer tape from Election Day prompted a dispute this morning at the U.S. Senate recount underway in Ramsey County. The mandatory statewide recount began last week in the race between Republican Norm Coleman and Democrat Al Franken. In Ramsey county, there were seven fewer ballots in the box from St. Paul's Ward 5, Precinct 8 than recorded on Nov. 4. Election judges counted the ballots three times before resealing the box amid protests from Franken's observers. County Elections Manager Joe Mansky said it's possible...

Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) could be ripe for a challenge for his seat in 2010, according to a new Quinnipiac University poll. Only 36 percent of voters in the survey said Martinez deserves a second term. More voters — 38 percent — say that he doesn’t, and 26 percent are not sure. When asked whom they would vote for if the election were held today, 40 percent said they would support the Democratic candidate and 36 percent said they would back Martinez.

Abstract: The runoff for a U.S. Senate seat in Georgia is providing a stark example of how candidates in the 2008 election have been able to skirt campaign-finance limits -- without actually breaking the law. Federal campaign-finance law limits individuals to donating $2,300 to a candidate per election. Yet Republicans and Democrats are soliciting donations more than 10 times that amount for the Dec. 2 runoff in Georgia. GOP fund-raisers are asking people to give as much as $65,500 toward incumbent Sen. Saxby Chambliss's campaign, while Democrats are seeking donations up to $30,800 for challenger Jim Martin. So how are...

After much speculation that his failed presidential bid would be his last campaign, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has decided to run for re-election to his Senate seat in 2010.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens dropped further behind Democrat Mark Begich in his re-election bid Tuesday as the convicted felon's 85th birthday became a grueling wait that could determine whether his decades-long hold on power is over. The longest-serving Republican in the history of the Senate trailed the Anchorage mayor by 2,374 votes out of 290,198 counted as election officials continued tallying absentee and other ballots. Begich had led by about 1,000 votes before Tuesday's count.

AK-Senate: Begich Widens Lead Democrat Mark Begich has nearly doubled his lead over Republican Sen. Ted Stevens with just 8,000 votes remaining to be counted in the Alaska Senate race, according to tabulations provided by the state's Division of Elections. With 16,000 of the 24,000 remaining ballots counted, according to the Anchorage Daily News, Begich now has 146,286 votes (47.56 percent) while Stevens has 143,912 votes (46.79 percent). Under Alaska law, a recount would be mandated only if the final margin is less than .5 percent ; Begich's lead is currently .77 percent. (Hat tip: Fellow numbers geek and Post...

The state Canvassing Board today directed that a recount begin tomorrow in the U.S. Senate race between Republican Sen. Norm Coleman and DFLer Al Franken, even as the board considers a last-minute request from the Franken campaign to include rejected absentee and mailed ballots in the initial count. The board confirmed that, with all the state's 87 counties reporting, Coleman leads Franken by 215 votes out of more than 2.9 million votes cast. After county canvasses showed a margin of 206, Coleman gained an additional 25 votes, and Franken 16, from a post-election audit of voting machines in 205 randomly-selected...

The 2008 United States Senate race in Minnesota is one of the closest electoral contests in recent history: as of this writing, out of over 2.9 million ballots cast only 206 votes separate incumbent Republican Senator Norm Coleman and his Democratic challenger, Al Franken. The Minnesota Senate race is slated to be recounted starting on November 19, 2008, and a key issue in the recount will be the approximately 34 thousand residual votes associated with it. A Senate residual vote is, roughly speaking, the product of a ballot that lacks a recorded Senate vote, and in the Minnesota Senate race...

Franken Asks State to Count Disqualified Ballots @ 2:44 pm by Hill Staff Democrat Al Franken’s (Minn.) campaign filed a campaign with Minnesota’s Board of Canvassers Monday asking the organization in charge of certifying election results to include some originally disqualified provisional and absentee ballots in the vote totals. “There are, of course, legitimate reasons to reject absentee ballots,” said Franken spokesman Andy Barr in a conference call with reporters. “But it is clear that there are some absentee ballots that have been rejected in error. Those votes should be counted.” The Franken campaign said they expected their campaign and...

Georgia supporters of the fair tax turned out en masse Sunday to cheer the idea of a national sales tax, which has become a thorny issue in the state’s high-profile Dec. 2 U.S. Senate runoff. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who won Georgia’s GOP presidential primary in February, joined about 2,000 people Sunday afternoon at the Gwinnett Civic Center in what became not just fair-tax rally, but a major campaign stop for Republican incumbent U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Moultrie. Chambliss backs the fair tax, which would abolish the Internal Revenue Service and replace the federal income tax and most...

Democrat Mark Begich now leads Sen. Ted Stevens (R) by just over 1,000 votes with more than 90 percent of the total ballots counted in the high-profile Alaska Senate race. The Alaska Division of Elections counted another 14,500 votes on Friday and Begich's lead increased from 841 before the day started to 1,022 when the counting ended.

The elections division still has over 10,000 ballots left to count today and thousands more through next week, but the latest numbers show Mark Begich leading Sen. Ted Stevens 125,019 to 125,016. The new numbers, reflecting nearly 43,000 absentee ballots counted today, are from all over the state. Election night, Ted Stevens led the Democratic Begich by about 3,000 votes. The state today is counting a total of about 60,000 absentee and questioned ballots. The Division of Elections said it expects to count roughly 35,000 additional absentee and questioned ballots over the next week.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who dipped into his own deep pockets to help finance his presidential bid, has directed $5,000 from his “Free and Strong America” political action committee to aid the recount effort of Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota. Mr. Coleman, the Republican incumbent, is locked in a tight race with his Democratic opponent Al Franken. Though the initial vote tally showed Mr. Coleman ahead by 725 votes, as counties double checked their figures over the last week that margin has thinned even more. As of Monday, just over 200 votes separated the two challengers. The vote totals...

The vote gap between Senate candidates Norm Coleman and Al Franken fluctuated throughout the day Thursday, with Franken closing to within 236 votes by Thursday evening.