Guest blogged by Jim Cirile
One of the more closely watched Senate contests is still undecided as of 11:30 PM Pacific time–Al Franken vs. Norm Coleman in Minnesota. Right now CNN.com is showing them in a statistical dead heat with 42% of the vote each with 94% of precincts reporting. However, at this moment Franken is behind by… 72 votes. That’s right–72. Just minutes ago with 93% reporting, Franken was down by 6,500 votes.
As Brad notes during his broadcast on NovaM Radio tonight, Franken was the only Air America Radio host who never wanted Brad on his show, as he was apparently completely disinterested in election integrity issues. So it should be interesting to see if Franken changes his tune if the numbers remain this close. If Franken loses by two votes, perhaps he’ll realize the importance of counting every vote. Of course, we hope Franken pulls it out. But right now it’s a squeaker! Stand by…
UPDATE 11:40pm PT Franken now trails by 1,200 votes but the race is still statistically tied.
UPDATE 11:55pm PT Franken down by 1,400 with 95% reporting. But: a caller just reported that the New York Times website was reporting that exit polls had Franken ahead by 12%–that data has now been scrubbed. Election integrity experts, have at it. Even if Franken wouldn’t stick up for election integrity, we shall stand up for him–and the voters in Minnesota. More on this to come, I’m sure.
UPDATE FROM DES, 11/5/08, 9:40am PT: The Associated Press announced this morning they are ‘un-calling’ the race they had previously rushed to call in favor of Coleman:
The AP called the race prematurely.
Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie said the recount won’t begin until mid-November at the earliest and will probably stretch into December.
Franken has, wisely, not conceded. More from Brad on all of this, no doubt, when he’s able to get caught back up from out of the prevailing whirlwinds…
UPDATE 11/5/08 9:02pm PT: More details on the race, and the flawed op-scanners used to ‘count’ it now here…
Update
Al Franken Pulls Ahead
by Jed L
Wed Nov 05, 2008 at 12:02:50 AM PST
As of about midnight Pacific, Al Franken took a 1,000 vote lead.
Based on some back of the envelope numbers and outstanding votes, he stands a good chance of maintaining that lead.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2...0177/99/653826
Update:
Coleman declares victory with around an 800 vote lead.
Franken does not concede and requires a recount alleging voting irregularities.
It could be days until we find out.
CNN removed 298 votes from Mr. Franken’s St. Louis county total between 4:50 and 5:00 am causing Mr. Franken’s statewide vote total to decrease by this amount. At the same time, Mr. Coleman’s St. Louis county and statewide vote count increased by 1109 in the same 10-minute time interval.
This may be a simple bookkeeping correction at CNN, but I’m always interested when vote totals decrease between two points in time.
Time Franken Coleman Barkley
4:50:00 AM 59050 34812 12920
5:00:00 PM 58752 35921 13139
5:10:00 PM 61228 36949 13679
5:15:00 PM 62394 37449 13920
5:20:00 PM 62970 37705 14027
5:30:00 PM 63976 38115 14234
In the St. Louis county running vote tally above, note that all times should be AM, not PM. My bad.
Verified Voting says paper ballots were used. How can a 12 point loss be explained?
Oh. Right. Al Franken might lose because he didn’t want to interview novice to politics, Brad Friedman. Brad who has done nothing to help election integrity other than to host a website, that, no doubt, he makes a lot of money hosting—by way of his numerous advertisers.
Brad is not an expert on anything. He’s like the rest of the bloggesphere–posting articles others have written—and claiming some kind of expertise because he knows how to google.
One of the things I liked about Al’s show is he had true experts on it—not posers like Brad.
Oh. And by the way. Minnesota has paper-based voting only. And very likely there will be a recount.
But not because of Brad Friedman.
KISMET:
I believe your first name is also known as “brent” and your last name is “brent turner”. The same brent turner who has launched all kinds of personal verbal and written attacks which include references to physical violence.
You poison all efforts for election integrity reform by shoving down people’s throats your ‘open source voting’ solution which is another electronic voting machine machine with “open code” instead of ‘proprietary code’.
You disrepect authors in the election integrity reform movement and you feel it is your obligation to do so though you have published zero books. the only thing you have published is continued written crap under yet another new psuedonym “KISMET”. What you really have become is a hothead and that’s being polite.
if you despise Brad so much, why don’t you stop visting his website permanently?
If it weren’t for the work of people like Brad Freidman, the internet, and what little progressive media we have the Rovebots would still be hatching their nasty schemes in the dark.
Reinstatement of our Constitutional rights, election integrity, media consolidation, and clean up of the DOJ, need to be at the top of the Obama administration “to do” list.
Does anyone have a screen capture of the NYT exit poll showing Al Franken’s 12 point lead?
You have to remember that even though we have paper ballots, they used scanners… ESS, Diebold… all of which are programed by a private companies and not checked. Will the SOS asked for a “rescan” or will we get a true hand count?
Is it a hand recount, or machine recount?
Kismet,
If you have good insurance and can find a good proctologist, sometimes they can get a head out of an ass. I think the procedure is uncomfortable but sounds like it’s worth it.
“announced this morning they are ‘un-calling’ the race”
What happened? Didn’t election officials have enough time to hack into their shiny new corrupt electronic voting machines? Guess they should have planned ahead and given themsleves more time.
Here in WV my mother had to pick Obama 3 or 4 times before it stuck. She would press the ES&S touchscreen and it would follow-up the vote with a ‘cancel’.
I suspect what also happened in some places was that people voted a straight party ticket (which votes for Obama) and then (as told, to be sure it took) they went to the presidential race and voted for Obama again — negating their own vote.
This system has got to go. It’s far too prone to error AND there’s no ballot to review or recount or show as evidence of a problem.
Brad and the whole election correction movement still has a long way to go.
BTW, here in WV we elected a Dem governor with 70% (that’s a lot) and yet went for McCain by something like 55%. How? Were there other Repubs winning down-ticket? No. How did McCain repeat Bush’s trick of winning big while Dems won everything else in the state. One exception: we had a Repub Congresswoman who won re-election. But, even in that it should’ve been a close race and yet she won as big as McCain.
Yes, there is still a lot of work to do.
“Here’s the full text of DFL Senate candidate Al Franken’s statement issued about 8:30 a.m, indicating that he and the Obama campaign have concerns about ‘irregularities’ at the polls that could have affected the vote totals:
[snip]
‘Let me be clear: Our goal is to ensure that every vote is properly counted.’
[snip]
‘Our office and the Obama campaign have received reports of irregularities at various precincts around the state. For instance, some polling places in Minneapolis ran out of registration materials. Our team has been working on those issues for several hours already, and they will continue to do so this morning as the recount process begins.'”
http://politicalblogs.startribu...onblog/?p=1191
– Tom
kizmet,
You’re just exposing your ignorance with such inane statements..you do know that, right? Ignorance or deceitful intent, no way to tell.
Honestly, your comment (6) actually made me laugh out loud. Thanks for that, anyway!
I’m the one who called Brad just before his show ended at 3 am ET (12 am PT). I did not think to get a screen shot of the Minnesota Senate race exit poll statement. Stupid me. I was on the NYTimes.com election results site for Minnesota. The left side of the screen showed the “actual” vote results for the major Minnesota contests. Franken and Coleman had basically been in a statistical dead heat for an hour or so.
Then I noticed an article on the right side of the screen, summarizing and commenting on the state results. The lead paragraph was about the tight Franken/Coleman race and ended with a sentence that described the exit polls being so different, but disparaging the validity of the exit poll because of the existence of a substantial third party candidate. That makes no sense to me.
The sentence revealed Franken being ahead of Coleman in the (obviously unadjusted) exit poll by 12 points. It was something like Franken 47%, Coleman 35%, third party candidate 18%. These numbers might be off by one or two points, but I am certain that Franken was ahead of Coleman by 12 points.
A little while later, after looking at other States’ results, I came back to Minnesota. The reported Franken/Coleman results were still a statistical dead heat, but the article on the right hand side was a little bit different. The sentence about the exit polls had been REMOVED! Obviously, the author (Schwartz?) thought better of leaving the sentence there, or was told by a higher up that revealing raw exit polls is a No No.
That’s when I called Brad on Nova M.
To those who don’t understand how election fraud can occur with paper ballots —
The optical scanners used to read the paper ballots in Minnesota are computers, just as easily hackable with vote flipping code as any other electronic voting machine. There is also the question of how the precinct vote totals are transmitted to the central tabulating location(s). If that happens electronically, be it using a modem over the phone lines, over the internet or over a private network, then the data can be easily intercepted and changed. Finally, the central tabulator itself is a computer, which can, of course, be programmed to do anything and everything the programmmer wants with those lovely little vote totals.
But the fact that there are paper ballots actually filled out by the voters allows for a real recount, if it is done by hand. Is that what Minnesota law calls for? I hope so, since a machine recount is a ridiculous notion. Also, I hope that the chain of custody procedures for the ballots is ironclad, and publicly visible at all steps. Otherwise, even a hand recount can be compromised.
Thank you Brad for being such a great voice for election integrity!
They are going to do a full hand recount of every county, using ‘intent’ as the standard, NOT a rescan or other type of measure. It will not start for 2 weeks. Additionally i learned today that the machines are mostly ES&S M100s although there are some AccuVotes from a company now called Premier / Premiere. (I work @ politicsinminnesota.com and attended today’s press conference with the SOS).
I’ve been a big bradblog fan for… well about 4 years. It will be interesting to see how this goes, and it could take into December to actually be completed. Additionally there will be recounts at the state legislature level for District 16 and 16A and I think another one as well.
Joan #17
I had a laugh too, thinking it was sarcasm not an actual attempt at making some ridiculous argument!
Hey,
Is Lincoln winking????
did anyone else see when the early voting numbers for Franken was updated with 8% of the precincts reported that Franken was ahead 5%? That amounted a margin of over 2,000 votes ahead of Coleman.
It is entirely possible that ES&S has programmed the vote such that Coleman will win but underestimated how much of a margin of theft would be needed. Someone like the FBI has to get involved and do some wiretapping/phonetapping on ES&S and find out who is involved, how much the ES&S folks are getting paid off for the Coleman theft and also the a few other elections.
Obama won last night for 2 reasons: 1) Rove and company simply couldn’t afford to buy off this election in light of a landslide and 2) I wouldn’t be surprised if Bush pulls a fast one and decides to declare some kind of martial law before Jan 20th as a result of some sort of either financial disaster, or biological (9/11 bioterror) disaster or some other sort of repeat 9/11 on US soil. Bush-McCain have simply been too civil and finally acting like the statesmen they claim to be.
I remember feeling like I wanted to tear my hair out after the 2004 election when Al Frankin and other ‘liberals’ would talk about the “mistakes” Kerry made during his campaign and would dismiss or ignore the obvious election fraud in Ohio.
I gave money to a number of campaigns around the country this time..but couldn’t bring myself to support Frankin because of that experience.
I couldn’t believe it this afternoon when Randi Rhodes confessed that Air America would not allow her to discuss the Ohio problems in ’04…Thus souring the relationship between Randa, Al and AA.
Having said that… I hope the recount corrects in Al’s favor and the Dems work like hell to fix the
election process…NOW…not 22 months from now. But I know they won’t do it without the public making constant demands.
Barack Obama 1,573,207
John McCain 1,275,429
Franken 1,211,167
Coleman 1,211,642
Double check that those are the counts, but doesn’t that mean 360,000 less votes for the senate race than the presidential race? Anyone find that fishy? Was there a 3rd party candidate or something?
Yes, there was a third party candidate for Senate in MN, Independent Dean Barkley.
Another thing concerning the results from St. Louis County, in 2004, there were at least 119457 votes cast. In 2008, there are only 118705 votes cast, and this is counting the third party candidates from the Secretary of State’s website. Were there really less votes cast this election than last, with such a hotly contested senate race?
See these:
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/
http://electionresults.sos.stat...ame=&DID=
If they will be counting paper ballots by hand, the issue now becomes whether the ballots are SECURE. Are they stored in a secure location in sealed containers, or have they been thrown into open cardboard boxes (as I witnessed at my local polling place in Natick, MA). The NH primary recount was compromised because the ballots were not secured (see blackboxvoting.org) — the same thing could happen in this instance.
If someone is able to swap unsecured ballots to make the paper match the reported total, they could be caught if they also tallied the lesser races (it’s almost impossible to switch Senate ballots, and still have the precinct House race results not change, for instance). But most election laws PROHIBIT the counting of the other races, which is another factor that enables fraud possible.
BTW, I was a big fan of Al’s radio show (and contributed to his candidancy) but Brad is absolutely right that Al refused to investigate electoral fraud in 2004, refused to allow those who did to have a voice on his show, and sometimes actively attacked the investigators as “conspiracy theorists.” I directly observed this listening to his show at the time, and it was in direct contrast to other broadcasters. Greg Palast has also confirmed that he was treated the same way Brad was by Al. How ironic.
I think everyone wants an honest election. If there was fruad in the Minn. Senate race, I would think the crooks would make sure the race would be won by more than 1%.If state law requires a recount at 1/2 of 1%. Why have a crooked race with a mandatory recount??????? Whatthe HELL are you people thinking????
BW may be right, because the crooks would force their candidate to concede( before the recount?) so as not to cause close inspection of their machines. Or can they cook the recount some way.
Demand video allowed, or live feed to public tv for the recount!!