I really want us to get this Senate seat

I will forever believe that there was something nefarious afoot the day Paul Wellstone, his wife, and his daughter were killed in a plane crash less than two weeks before the 2002 election. The Republicans wanted that seat...badly. And Paul Wellstone was a very popular Senator in Minnesota.

Al Franken was a friend of Paul Wellstone's, and his Senate run this year had the aura not of a vanity project, but of a personal quest; a promise to a friend. There was something of Inigo Montoya to all this, as Franken worked his state county by county, talking about policy, to show that he's more than Stuart Smalley. And it seems to have largely worked. How largely remains to be seen, but Franken's vote deficit, before the recount even begins, is down to a bare 236:

Just as Secretary of State Mark Ritchie was explaining to reporters the recount process in one of the narrowest elections in Minnesota history, an aide rushed in with news: Pine County's Partridge Township had revised its vote total upward -- another 100 votes for Democratic candidate Al Franken, putting him within .011 percentage points of Republican U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman.

The reason for the change? Exhausted county officials had accidentally entered 24 for Franken instead of 124 when the county's final votes were tallied at 5:25 Wednesday morning.

"That's why we have recounts," Ritchie said, surveying the e-mail sent in from the county auditor. "Human error. People make mistakes."

The margin in the tightest Senate race in the country bounced like the stock market throughout the day, with the difference between Coleman and Franken dropping, then rising briefly to 590 votes before shooting down to a razor-thin 236 by day's end.

In a reversal of the previous day, when Coleman had declared victory and suggested that Franken should waive a recount, Coleman kept to himself on Thursday, while Franken called reporters to talk about the prospects for a continued narrowing of the count.

"Coleman said there was no reason for a recount, that there would be no movement," Franken said Thursday, a day after unofficial results initially showed Coleman with a 725-vote advantage. "But you see that it's more than halved and the recount hasn't even started. This election will be decided by the voters, not by the candidates."

Note the "accidental" dropping of a digit in the vote count. While Minnesota usually isn't mentioned among states with habitual voting problems, in a race this close, it is not immune to problems, as Brad Friedman notes:

• While all of Minnesota votes on paper ballots, thankfully. Though all of those ballots are scanned, rather than counted, on proprietary optical-scan systems made by either ES&S or Diebold. Both companies produce systems that regularly fail to count and/or record ballots correctly.

• The majority of counties use the ES&S M-100, precinct-based optical scanner. As we noted on Monday, that same scanner was found, according to a letter sent to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) by a county in MI, to have failed pre-election "logic and accuracy testing". The M-100, according to the letter from county officials, “reported inconsistent vote totals", such that “The same ballots run through the same machines, yielded different results each time.” Public Record has more details tonight.

• Two of Minnesota's three largest counties (Anoka and Dakota) use the Diebold AccuVote OS scanners to "count" their ballots. That system is the same one seen being hacked via its memory card in the Emmy-nominated HBO documentary Hacking Democracy. You can watch the actual hack from the film below (appx 9 mins)
  
  
  
  

  (By the way, the Diebold op-scanner used above, and in MN, was also used in January's New Hampshire primary when pre-election polls and exit polls determined Obama would be the winner, only to see him lose to Hillary Clinton. Obama was found to have won in the 20% of NH which counts their ballots by hand. While Clinton won, by an almost precisely flipped margin, in the 80% of NH that used the Diebold op-scan system seen being hacked in the mock-election seen being manipulated in the clip above.)

Given that the last person to cross the Republicans in Minnesota died in an still-unexplained plane crash, it is hardly unreasonable to want the election there this year to reflect the will of the people.

If Franken prevails, things start to get interesting. Yesterday's declaration of Jeff Merkley in the Oregon Senate race against Gordon Smith gives the Democrats 57 seats. Franken would be 58. The outcome of the Georgia and Alaska seats are still up in the air. Frankly (or Frankenly), I'd rather top out at 58 and be able to give Joe Lieberman the kicking to the curb he so richly deserves than have 59 Senators plus Joe Lieberman and put that POS in the position of holding the outcome of every vote for the next six years in his foul,shit-stained little hands.