On December 1, I published an excerpt from an email from a GOP recount observer.<\/p>\n
Quoting myself:<\/p>\n
This email, from a GOP election recount-watcher, has been making the rounds of local conservative activists.\u00a0 I\u2019m keeping the writer\u2019s name off the record for now.<\/p>\n
Emphasis is added by me:<\/p>\n
Well, it\u2019s been a good (better) day today here at Hennepin County for the recount. Lots of notable errors in judgment\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n
For instance, we found one precinct with ALL Dayton ballots challenged (103 total) that appeared to be a \u201cmass\u201d group of blank ballots run thru without a judge\u2019s signature \u2013 all in a row<\/strong>. Shows how easily certain folks of a party\u2019s persuasion can cheat so easily \u2013 and have it counted?<\/em><\/p>\n
Let\u2019s repeat that for those of you who glaze over:\u00a0 103 votes, run through in a group, without a judge\u2019s signature, apparently consecutively<\/strong>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I asked the source of this email earlier this week what the resolution of this issue was.\u00a0 The source wasn’t entirely clear on how things turned out: she or he sent me this message:<\/p>\n
I think it was 102-103 ballots in Hennepin County (some precinct) that looked suspicious, and were run through the machine and counted in the total. What was believed was it happened after the polls (and machines) were closed and counted w\/ a tape already generated…. Hence, the difference in the counts from registered voters vs. the machine counts…I was told the sequence and appearance of these ballots looked suspicious and forged, and now that I think about it, I remember one of the primary reasons they weren’t allowed was they were not properly signed off by the appropriate parties – yet, counted. If my memory serves me right, they were taken out of the totals once discovered.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Now, I’ve been getting regular, frequent emails for the past six weeks from a regular reader who is also a supporter of our current election system and, I’d suspect, of Secretary of State Mark Ritchie.\u00a0\u00a0 According to this person, it would be impossible for this scenario to have happened; that that’s just not how canvassing and recounts work.<\/p>\n
That, of course, is one of the problems of blogging; when one is an actual, full-time, employed journalist, one has time to learn enough about the subject about which one is writing to comment on it with more literacy than when one has other things going on in life.<\/p>\n
So OK, fair enough.\u00a0 I’m way too buried with personal and day-job business to really dig into it all that much at the moment.\u00a0 I guess, at least as regards this particular episode, the iron-clad integrity of the Henco elections staff, of Mark Ritchie, and of everyone involved is unimpeachable.\u00a0 Until a better explanation drops into my lap. at any rate.<\/p>\n
Which it’ll have to do, because – and this is an admission against interest – I have a hard time concentrating on that sort of anal-retentive, pointillistic, nit-picky, left-brain sort of thing.\u00a0 God bless those who can – but I can’t.\u00a0 Call it a learning disability, and a politically-imprudent one at that, but my brain just tunes out the finer points of the mechanics of recounts.\u00a0 There’s a reason I’m not an actuary, an accountant, or a wedding planner.<\/p>\n
And that’s that, I guess.<\/p>\n
Well, no.\u00a0 It’s not.\u00a0 The person who’s written, and left any number of comments in the blog on the subject, said it was a matter of my “integrity” to “fact-check” this story – and that if it didn’t check out, somehow my premise that the Minnesota electoral system is flawed is, itself, flawed.<\/p>\n
As re the electoral system?\u00a0 Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.\u00a0 Much better minds than I – or at least much more methodical ones – are digging into that even as we speak.<\/p>\n