Ballots Disappear In Minnesota

The recount of the results in the Minnesota is still going on a month after the official election day. The senate race between Democrat Al Franken and Republican Norm Coleman had finished in nearly a dead heat. After counting several million votes, the two candidates were separated by only a couple of hundred votes. According to Minnesota law, that meant a recount must be done.

After several weeks of counting, 94.3% has been counted and only 138,000 votes remain to be counted. According to Marc Elias from the Franken campaign, Al Franken has taken the lead for the first time in the race - by a 22 vote margin.

Now the count moves to Wright County, which is a largely Republican area and could put Coleman back into the lead. After all the votes have been counted, the Canvassing Board must consider all the "challenged" ballots by both sides. Each side has challenged more than a thousand ballots.

But perhaps the most disturbing thing for the Franken campaign is some missing ballots. In the 1st precinct of the third ward in Minneapolis, a pracinct that heavily favored Franken, it looks like about 133 ballots are now missing. On election day, 2,028 votes were counted, but when the recount was done only 1896 were counted.

Minnesota elections director Cindy Reichert originally claimed that no ballots were missing. She said the ballots with write-ins had just been counted twice. However, a couple of different things show that to be unlikely.

First, if the write-ins were counted twice, then totals of write-ins for individual races should be an even number (2 X anything = even number). But that is not the case. Several races show an odd number of write-ins, and several even show only one write-in (an impossibility for a double count).

The double count scenario also doesn't account for the election day count of registered voters. There were:
1047 pre-registered voters signed in
932 voters registered on election day
50 absentee ballots were accepted for the precinct
That is a total of 2,029 votes on election day (only one off the 2,028 reported on election day, and 133 off the recount total of 1,896).

There are missing votes in this Franken precinct. Where are they? Can they be found? As close as this election is, that's possibly enough ballots to make a huge difference in the outcome.

It's looking more likely every day that this election will wind up in the courts.