There will be no doubt who is to blame.
This is crazy. Yes it was a very close election. But Coleman was ahead by 700+ votes on election night. Ever since then, the re-count and additional absentee ballots only added to Franken’s total, never adding to Coleman.
Sad to say, Republicans have to win elections by bigger margins so that re-counts and newly discovered ballots can’t be used to change an election result.
So, to get from about 700 ahead to 312 behind was a swing of about 1000 votes. It’s probably easy for the Dems. to find that many extra votes somewhere.
Remember in 2004, how the Democrats wanted to make Ohio’s vote re-count into another Florida? Bush was ahead on election night by about 120,000 votes, and the final count after they did their provisional count and re-count showed Bush ahead by about 89,000 votes. That was a swing of about 30,000 statewide in Ohio. It wasn’t enough to change the outcome that year, but in a close election it would have been plenty.
Bottom line is that Republicans have to win by many thousands of votes to prevent the vote manipulation that can happen.