Minnesota and Florida recounts are polls apart

December 30, 1:53 PMSouth St. Paul ExaminerRob Shirk

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Minnesota recount officials

The painstaking process the Minnesota secretary of state is overseeing is stumbling today as the State Canvassing Board has begun to review a sizable number of wrongly rejected absentee ballots in a continuing effort to declare a winner in the U.S. senate race between Landslide Norm Coleman and Landslide Al Franken.

The recount is mandated by Minnesota law that any state or federal election that ends with differences .05 per cent or less triggers an automatic recount whether the candidates like it or not. It's kind of like the two minute warning in football. It gets called for both sides at the same time. No questions or arguments.

There have been the inevitable comparisons to the Florida presidential recount in 2000 between Al Gore and George Bush and the Minnesota senate recount of 2008.

The resemblance is frivolous and puerile as the only thing that seems to be "witty" is that both states end with a phonetically close sounding "ta" and a "da". FloriDA and MinnesoTA have been reworded to FloriDUH and MinnesoDUH. Get it? Ha Ha Ha. What a scream.

The Minnesota State Canvassing Board has been unanimous in its judgments and has left no room for the internal political squabbles that plagued Florida's wicked, partisan experience under the guidance of former Florida Republican Secretary of State Katherine Harris. Their main goal, it seems, was to get that election settled quickly. Mission accomplished. FloriDUH and MinnesoDUH! What a knee-slapper. The two don't relate to one another other than they both involve recounts. It's like comparing snow skiing to water skiing. They are both skiing, but...

The Minnesota State Canvassing Board, has played this out in a detailed and conscientious manner with unity and fairness. It takes time to try to count every last one of the 2.4 million or so votes.The November election day totals were 2,422,924.

The Landslide Al campaign wrote a letter last week to the Landslide Norm campaign that they would accept all of the 1350 rejected absentee ballots without question to be examined by the State Canvassing Board, a five member group headed by Secretary of State Mark Ritchie

Although the Board has been lauded from all participants for its orderly and transparent work, The Landslide Norm campaign insists on everyone going out to twelve regional centers this week to review the ballots in question. Well, OK. If you insist, and they did. Out they went and as of late Monday, the disagreements were boiling over to the point that Canvassing Board official Deputy Secretary of State Jim Gelbmann at one location asked the participants to remain "civil."

A late proposal from Landslide Norm Coleman -- to review 654 more votes atop the 1,346 absentee ballots that local officials had already agreed were mistakenly rejected -- threatened to derail the process.

You're giving the local officials very little time for a very daunting task. - Jim Gelbmann

The Minnesota Supreme Court ordered that when agreement is found, these rejected, absentee ballots will be added to the total needed to be counted. They'd better not let the grass grow under their feet. The Court's long known deadline ends in four days. As there will be over a thousand ballots reviewed, the scales could shift, as a couple of hundred rejected ballots probably will figure in to the total.

An analysis of the origins of 93 percent of those ballots suggests an advantage for Franken.- Minneapolis StarTribune

On Wednesday the participants will spend New Years Eve hoisting a few, whirl their noise-makers, wish everyone a prosperous and Happy New Year, and avoid telling a few back-slapping jokes about FloriDUH and MinnesoDUH. They'll then get ready for more tedious counting and be ready to have the contentious candidates try to agree on any rejected absentee ballots that might be added to the total.

You ought to see these things. No wonder they are flummoxed. Big Goof and Little Goof apparently registered to vote in the state of Minnesota. Go ahead. You try to count them in a hurry without saying "Ooops" or having someone say, "I think you missed one, let's start over."

Let's count them in Tallahassee.