Wishful Thinking

TheHill.com - Franken camp claims margin at 50; new ballots found:

"So far, the Franken campaign claims to have picked up 165 votes in the hotly contested recount. That number, Elias said, includes all ballots challenged by both campaigns, assuming any calls made by neutral election judges on the scene are accurate.

Coleman’s campaign has challenged approximately 300 more ballots than Franken’s, leaving those votes off the official tally posted on the Minnesota Secretary of State’s website, which shows Coleman leading by 340 votes."

Okay a couple of things ... most of those 'challenged' votes would have been kicked out by the machines as spoiled ballots anyways -- they should some of them on tv.

In MN we use electronic scanners -- if you have any marks outside of the circle then the ballot is REJECTED ... if after three tries the ballot box still won't take it, the judges are supposed to ask you to revote.

Then that ballot is SPOILED and DOESN'T COUNT!!!! which makes sense since you got to recast a new one.

Problem with the recount is that they tend to count those spoiled votes as well!!! WHICH IS TOTALLY WRONG -- now they did find some missing votes in a voting machine which had problems at one of the sites .... but I have to question those votes as well.***

Secondly -- Franken is trying to say that the tally is only 50 votes difference ... BS! They are doing some creative math here - thought he would have fired that accounting firm after the income tax fiasco -- they are counting the votes that THEY challenged but not the ones that COLEMAN has challenged, at least that's my understanding.

Only thing is .... the challenged votes haven't been counted yet! What an ass .... so even by his OWN COUNTING he has LOST the race -- but STILL he refuses to face REALITY!!!!!!

Franken GO HOME -- to New York which is where your heart really is.

***One of the voting sites had a machine go down and had a new one delivered, what is supposed to happen is that the votes cast on the old machine get rescanned into the new machine and the old machine count discarded -- BUT -- according to reports since this happened during a busy time, the judges simply put the old machine aside and meant to get to it later but then forgot.

Now normally part of the process before closing down the site is to rectify their counts -- that is match up the number of votes tallied on the machine to the number of people who actually voted.

see when you go thru the line to vote you are supposed to get a ticket that shows what number voter you are - you hand that slip to the person with the actual ballot before you can vote .... if the last slip said 105,032 and they only had a vote tally on the machines adding up to 104,973 ... someone had better do some checking to find out where the other 59 votes went!!!

granted I could see where they would have a tough time counting each ballot to check ... but just adding up the machine tallies should have let them know there were over 100 votes missing!!

Question also comes up - why weren't these ballots found when the machines were taken back to the county? I always thought the machines were reset and checked at that time -- guess not.