Posted: Friday, 03 July 2009 03:21
by Dave Mindeman
It is somewhat amazing that the Wall Street Journal continues to expound factually inaccurate opinions on Minnesota's Senate race. Each and every time they have rendered their "opinion" in the matter, they have distorted the facts, belittled Minnesota's voting regulations, and simply played the "sore loser" hype right over the top.
We have yet another (hopefully the last) attack on the US Senate election.
First, we get their version of the "facts":
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.
Now, let's try to go over this one more time. The numbers on election night were not complete. Several counties had not yet reported in....and several counties had yet to fact check their counts and did find errors.
The Franken legal team didn't manipulate anything. Norm Coleman's legal team was in full force as well. And let's be clear, during the recount, the election officials were in control of the process. Franken and Coleman teams were allowed to challenge ballots and if the WSJ had looked at the facts, they would have found that Coleman's team challenged more ballots than Franken.
Then the WSJ gets to the heart of the matter:
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.
Both legal teams were attempting to point out absentee ballots that were "wrongfully" disqualified. The key word is wrongfully. The votes involved here were legally cast votes that were mistakenly rejected. During this part of the recount phase, those votes were handled properly by giving them to the canvassing board for direction. They issued unanimous decisions about allowing the ballots to be counted. This decision was not Franken's and it wasn't Coleman's. Of those 1350 ballots, only 900+ were allowed to be counted. This decision was handed down by 4 judges and the Secretary of State -- as the law dictated.
And the WSJ goes on:
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. Mr. Coleman didn't lose the election. He lost the fight to stop the state canvassing board from changing the vote-counting rules after the fact.
The WSJ admits that Coleman hadn't proved his case. That is the essence of any court procedure -- prove your case. Coleman was so busy trying to sway public opinion about how the absentee ballots were handled that he forgot to do the most important thing -- bring in the evidence. The problem was that evidence was lacking in the first place and this doomed the Coleman case as well.
And the incredible accusation that the canvassing board was changing the vote counting rules? Have we forgotten that these absentee ballots were examined over and over and over again. The wrongfully rejected ballots were rightly allowed in as soon as they were discovered. The remainder were rejected for cause. They were rejected for legal reasons. Some counties may have erred in their interpretation of the law, but that certainly doesn't mean the law can be bent or ignored.
That was the Minnesota Supreme Court's decision.
If we are supposed to accept Bush v Gore because the Court's have the final say, then this Wall Street Journal tripe about Coleman v Franken is just that -- tripe.
The Journal has the unmitigated gaul to say that "Franken stole the election". If there was larceny involved, then all the unamimous decisions of the state canvassing board must have been fiction and all the unamimous court decisions at every single level must have been fabricated.
This was an election that was scrutinized in every detail. Nothing was overlooked. Nothing was left to chance.
Coleman had his day in court -- better to say months in court. Minnesota was patient almost to a fault.
Sorry, Wall Street Journal, the only crime here is your Editorial Board's assault on the truth.
