MInnesota’s vote: Cast into doubt…./my head hurts!
Read it and weep:
A month after Election Day, recounters were still thumbing through piles of ballots for Norm Coleman and Al Franken in a one-story building in Shakopee that some joked was an apt setting for a postmortem. “This used to be a funeral home,” said Scott County elections supervisor Mary Kay Kes. “And we have the ballots resting over there in the viewing area.” Minnesota’s voting system has been laid out for 40 days now, flaws and all, under intense scrutiny.
As the U.S. Senate recount careens toward a pivotal week of state Canvassing Board hearings, many election experts insist that the state’s voting system — often cited as one of the nation’s best — has held up well under examination. But some Minnesotans have seen their faith rattled.
The recount has revealed numerous missteps, some involving enough ballots to tip the balance.
A machine jammed in Maplewood, resulting in 177 ballots going uncounted until the final day of the recount in Ramsey County. Minneapolis officials are still unable to locate 133 ballots cast at the University Lutheran Church of Hope; state officials ordered that the votes, which were counted on Election Day, remain in the final results. And more than 1,600 absentee ballots were improperly rejected by local officials.
Simply put, Minnesota’s election system, like any other, struggles to parse results in which the margin between candidates is measured in one-thousandths of a percent.
Shaken confidence
Meet Mary Swanson and Ariel Kagan.
Swanson, 70, lives in Edina, knits avidly and has been marking ballots since she first pulled a lever for Eisenhower in the 1950s. Kagan, 19, is a sophomore at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts.
Swanson underwent foot surgery Nov. 4, so she voted the Friday before Election Day in Edina with her husband. Their votes were counted, but only because a meticulous election clerk didn’t let them leave before discovering Dean Swanson had failed to sign the back of his absentee envelope.
“If we lived in a different county[…]