Franken to Coleman: Where's The Beef?
Nate Silver
FiveThirtyEight
EDIT (8:10 AM): The Uptake, which we've recommended to you many times, will have a live streaming feed of the Canvassing Board's activities today beginning at 9 AM Minnesota time. This is separate and distinct from the Supreme Court's ruling, which probably won't come until later in the day.
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In a 26-page response filed on Monday with the Minnesota Supreme Court, Al Franken's campaign disputes Norm Coleman's claim that a significant number of ballots were double-counted in Minnesota, chiding Coleman's petition for a lack of evidence.
To briefly review the mechanics of the dispute: under certain circumstances in Minnesota, a duplicate ballot must be created on Election Day. This happens when the ballot cannot be read properly by a machine scanner, either because it is has been damaged in some way or -- as in the case of many overseas absentee ballots -- it has been printed out on a non-regulation type of paper. When this occurs, both the original ballots and the duplicates are supposed to be labeled carefully; i.e. "Original #1", "Original #2", "Original #3", and "Duplicate #1", "Duplicate #2", "Duplicate #3". The duplicates are then run through the scanners and the originals segregated and preserved for safe-keeping.
In advance of the manual recount, however, the campaigns agreed that rather than counting the duplicate ballots, they would instead count the originals. Why the change of course? The problem with the originals is that they can't be read by a machine scanner. In the recount, however, all ballots are counted by hand, rendering this problem moot. The original ballots, the campaigns seemed to believe, preserved a purer, more foolproof impression of voter's intent. Therefore, during the recount, any ballots identified as duplicates were pulled from the pile and not counted, and the originals counted in their place.
The problem is that in some cases -- likely involving a couple hundred ballots statewide -- there was a discrepancy between the number of originals and the number of duplicates. So, for example, you might have original ballots labeled #1-#4, but only duplicates #1, 2, and 4 were found during the hand recount, with no match for #3. Or, worse still, you might not find any ballots labeled as duplicates at all.
(Continued here.)
FiveThirtyEight
EDIT (8:10 AM): The Uptake, which we've recommended to you many times, will have a live streaming feed of the Canvassing Board's activities today beginning at 9 AM Minnesota time. This is separate and distinct from the Supreme Court's ruling, which probably won't come until later in the day.
____
In a 26-page response filed on Monday with the Minnesota Supreme Court, Al Franken's campaign disputes Norm Coleman's claim that a significant number of ballots were double-counted in Minnesota, chiding Coleman's petition for a lack of evidence.
To briefly review the mechanics of the dispute: under certain circumstances in Minnesota, a duplicate ballot must be created on Election Day. This happens when the ballot cannot be read properly by a machine scanner, either because it is has been damaged in some way or -- as in the case of many overseas absentee ballots -- it has been printed out on a non-regulation type of paper. When this occurs, both the original ballots and the duplicates are supposed to be labeled carefully; i.e. "Original #1", "Original #2", "Original #3", and "Duplicate #1", "Duplicate #2", "Duplicate #3". The duplicates are then run through the scanners and the originals segregated and preserved for safe-keeping.
In advance of the manual recount, however, the campaigns agreed that rather than counting the duplicate ballots, they would instead count the originals. Why the change of course? The problem with the originals is that they can't be read by a machine scanner. In the recount, however, all ballots are counted by hand, rendering this problem moot. The original ballots, the campaigns seemed to believe, preserved a purer, more foolproof impression of voter's intent. Therefore, during the recount, any ballots identified as duplicates were pulled from the pile and not counted, and the originals counted in their place.
The problem is that in some cases -- likely involving a couple hundred ballots statewide -- there was a discrepancy between the number of originals and the number of duplicates. So, for example, you might have original ballots labeled #1-#4, but only duplicates #1, 2, and 4 were found during the hand recount, with no match for #3. Or, worse still, you might not find any ballots labeled as duplicates at all.
(Continued here.)
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