Minnesota uses optical scanning ballots, you have to take a marker and draw a line completing an arrow next to the name of the candidate for whom you want to vote. The machines can misscan, but there will not be the issues of dimpled or hanging chads like there were in Florida in 2008. There will be a mark or there won't. Voter intent will be pretty evident.

is suffering from a mental recession.

1. MN law demands an automatic recount when elections are within 0.05% Even on election night, the difference between the 2 candidates was < 0.02%

2. Did Coleman not know who the MN secretary of state was before election night? Sounds like he's not paying enough attention to the goings-on in his constituency.

3. This is the last card in Rove's deck: smearing ACORN. But no one's buying it.

4. The recount, as the article stated, will be overseen by the MN SoC, 2 SCOMN justices, and 2 judges. This will be a bipartisan/nonpartisan, transparent, affair. There will be no "hanging chads" to decipher: optical scan ballots will likely be very easy to clue us in to voter's intent.

https://www.revisor.leg.state.mn.us/rules/?id=8235&view=chapter&keyword_type=&keyword=of&redirect=0

https://www.revisor.leg.state.mn.us/rules/?id=8235&view=chapter&keyword_type=&keyword=of&redirect=0

Good luck, Norm! You're going to need it!!

like the National Council of Churches. Yeah, right.

...who is going to play Al Franken on "Saturday Night Live?"

Why do they hate democracy so much?

Both parties steal elections. Republicans steal elections by suppressing votes and Democrats steal elections by counting votes.

Same thing.

;>

Okay, so Coleman and Franken are separated by 206 votes out of over two million cast. According to 538's estimate, less than 1 ballot out of every 600 will be reclassified during the recount.

These are infinitesimal numbers that are swamped by a thousand other noise-generating factors. Did it rain on election day? How late were the polls open? Who won the news cycle immediately prior to the vote?

When the two candidates are within a hundredth of a percent of each other, it seems pointless to bicker over the intent of a handful of ballots. Screw the whole "whoever got the most votes is the rightful winner" paradigm. The point of an election is to determine the will of the electorate, and to the limits of that tool's resolution, "the electorate" is indifferent to the outcome.

If the balloting puts two candidates within a half a percent of each other, flip a freaking coin.

One thing that rankled was that if someone wrote "Gore" on his ballot but it was otherwise ok, it was disqualified. I propose that there be a constitutional amendment stating that in any election for federal office the Minnesota standard should prevail: If the intent of the voter can be determined, his/her vote should count!

Suppress voters whenever possible. Try to intimidate election officials whenever necessary. Try to discredit a process prescribed by the very laws of the state where the election takes place if it serves a purpose. Spin it somehow to delegitimize the outcome if it doesn't go their way.

Nothing Norman's partisans are doing is in any way surprising. Maybe they'll even arrange their own "Brooks Brothers Riot" before it's over. Wouldn't that make Norman someone to be proud of for all Minnesotans?

Go home, Norman. Go somewhere. You don't belong in the Senate.

If there's someone I would trust to carry out a fair recount, it's Mark Ritchie. I've had the privilege of working with him more than once, and brother, does that guy love & respect the process of fair democracy. He seems to aggravate certain sectors of the Republican party structure, but my guess is that a certain dogged determination combined with humble adherence to rules drives people crazy. They tried to do him in last year on a technical e-mailing slip-up, and it was a huge relief to see him pull through that scenario with his job intact. In every way, he's about as far from Katherine Harris & the Florida shenanigans as you can possibly get.

So take whatever negative press you read about him with a grain of salt - as far as I can tell (not that my anonymous Salon opinion counts for much, but anyway), he's the real deal.

I think the Supreme Court should get involved. They have a stellar record when it comes to fixing elections. I'm sorry, I forgot. They're too busy trying to figure out what profanity is, whether the Navy can use sonar to confuse dolphins, and what kind of monuments can go in public parks. What could be more important than that? I guess we will just have to let Minnesota follow the law instead.

Not to Republicans. To them, the act of actually counting votes is "clear evidence of funny business."

What is everyone getting their knickers in a twist over? The vote isn't done yet! Gabriel sounds like he hit on the cause in the first paragraph "just trying to derail the count" since Coleman's margin is slipping away. I was born in Pine County, and have every faith in the election systems in place in that great place. They'll do the right thing if everyone else will stay out of it.

Since when is the Nation Council of Churches a "radical" organization? I can see putting Greenpeace on that list, I'm a member of that! But NCC? Bizarre.

In our state, I have worked on a few recounts as a County Election official. We too, have optical scanners.

In recounts, we have found the scanners to be very accurate except for those ballots that were not clearly marked, sometimes (we suspected) by elderly folks, because the marks were very shaky.

But on the most local county level, as much as I could not stand my Republican counter part, I think we had a pretty good system. We counted the ballots and AGREED, with an unbiased official overlooking the process. Also, in some instances, representatives for both candidates have sit and watched.

I have faith in the recount system because of this. We gave credit to the obvious intent of the voter, no matter what party.

Even though I hate the way people in my red state vote, I don't think our system is corrupt. I think it is very accurate.