What's funny is that our ballots here require you to color in a circle next to the candidates name. No hanging chads possible. Anyone who's taken a machine scored test in school understands the mechanics involved in casting a vote. And, to top it off, when you insert your ballot into the box, it is electronically scanned. If you did happen to vote for two candidates for the same office, it is immediately kicked back to you as an invalid ballot. There is no chance for subsequent interpretation of “voter intent.” You cast a valid ballot with a vote for that office, or you didn't. Period.
So, this charade of a recount is focused on human error by the precinct judges, you know, when they sent in the tallies from their precinct, they transposed a number of two. Always to be resolved in the DFL’s favor, of course. And, do not be surprised when magic boxes of ballots that were mistakenly not counted start appearing.
In any case, I'm sure I'll be in the minority here, but please, don't spend your vacation dollars in Minnesota. The only way this sort of crap is ever going to change is if we stop enabling the DFL to run roughshod over us, and the only way to stop that is to stop enabling the maroons in St. Paul by denying them their tribute, er, taxes. For crying out loud, we just voted ourselves a constitutionally earmarked sales tax increase to fund the environment and the arts.
I keep telling myself that someone has to stay here to keep fighting the good fight, but Sioux Falls looks better and better with each passing day.
No hanging chads possible. Anyone who’s taken a machine scored test in school understands the mechanics involved in casting a vote. And, to top it off, when you insert your ballot into the box, it is electronically scanned.
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Here is where you are seeing the ‘rules’ from a different perspective than the people who are going to do the recount. Of course, an optical scanner counts the votes when the correct number of circles are filled in.
The Secretary of State is not going to refeed these correctly completed ballots into machines again, but is going to ‘scrutinize’ each ballot for the INTENT of the voter. I heard him say on a newscast “some people make an “x” and some people make a “check” and some people make a mark “near” the bubble. These will all be counted.”
These marks are not read by the optical scanner, but the ballot is not spit out, the ballot is just registered as a “no vote” for that particular contest. Most of these improperly filled in, and not counted by the scanner, votes will be for Al Franken. Bet on it!