Honesty Is Hardly Ever Heard
By Mitch Berg
I’ve never been a huge Adam Platt fan, but he certainly has his moments:
The Minnesota Supreme Court is days away from hearing arguments in Coleman’s election challenge. It comes down to this: absentee ballots were rejected in different counties and municipalities with varying levels of rigor and adherence to the law. I don’t think either side denies this. The election challenge judges concluded that because Coleman could not prove this variance caused him to lose the election, it was not germane.
Because that court refused to reexamine every absentee ballot, we don’t know what they would tell us. (I suspect Franken would still win.) But if the shoe was on the other foot, and Al trailed by 300, wouldn’t Franken supporters be crying for justice? Would Al have bowed out? Let’s be intellectually honest here—no way.
And it’s nice to see at least one of “them” being intellectually honest.
Look – that’s the biggest scandal of this botched Senate election; I doubt one voter out of 10,000, including the various judges involved, could correctly explain how a 200-odd vote Coleman lead turned into a 200-odd vote Franken one. I doubt even that many of them could come up with a rationale for having different counting stanards in every jurisdiction, for a US Senate race. And I think you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who can justify the rate at which absentee ballots have gone miscounted in this race (which is, by the way, further proof of Berg’s Seventh Law; “When a Democrat defames a conservative’s regard for ethics or the law, they are projecting“; remember how the DFL accused Mary Kiffmeyer of “disenfranchising voters”, without ever showing a single, er, disenfranchised voter?).
Hopefully, Minnesota will learn its lessons from this campaign. Why, if we have a conscientious Secretary of State who can put his partisan urges aside to work on fixing the voting sytem…
…oh. Yeah. We’re screwed.
