Proofiness - Charles Seife [51]
At first glance, Minnesota would seem to be the most unlikely spot in the nation for the site of a bitter and dirty electoral battle. The citizens of the state have a reputation for being ridiculously earnest and forthright. In other places, election wrongdoing might involve stuffing ballot boxes, phony voter registration, or suppressing votes. In Minnesota, the biggest electoral scandal in recent history had to do with Twinkies.
Make no mistake, though. Twinkiegate was big news for Minnesota; it even made national headlines. In 1986, a grand jury indicted George Belair for maliciously distributing $34.13 worth of Twinkies, Ho-Hos, and doughnuts to senior citizens while he was running for the Minneapolis city council. “How could anyone bribe someone with Twinkies?” Belair asked, baffled, as he was hauled off to jail. But Belair had in fact fallen afoul of a state law that forbids candidates from providing food or entertainment to voters. The case ended a few weeks later when the charges were dropped by a judge.
What’s more, Minnesota had about the most modern and well-thought-out election laws on the books. After the Bush v. Gore fiasco, a number of states, including Minnesota, reworked their laws and regulations to try to avoid another electoral disaster. Minnesota’s laws were extremely precise—the rules about how to interpret questionable ballots were, theoretically, all decided ahead of time. (No hanging-chad debates for Minnesota!) The state’s statutes were so prescriptive that they even dictated how to stack ballots for counting—in groups of twenty-five, placed crosswise. Perhaps the most reassuring element of Minnesota’s election laws was that they created a built-in error-checking mechanism to ensure that ballots were being counted properly. No matter how close an election is, a selection of precincts all around the state have to recount all their ballots by hand to ensure that the counts are accurate. Further, if the vote is extremely close—if the margin between the candidates is less than half a percent of the number of votes cast—it automatically triggers a statewide recount.
Thanks to the modern electoral laws, the uniform voting procedures, and the honest character of the citizens of the state, it’s hard to imagine better conditions for a fair and uncontroversial election than Minnesota in 2008. Even though the election was looking fairly tight by the end of October—polls, for what they’re worth, disagreed about who was in the lead—nobody anticipated the nastiness, vitriol, and proofiness that would envelop the state for months to come.
True, the campaign itself had been ugly, especially by Minnesota standards. The challenger, Al Franken, an ex-comedian perhaps best known for his book Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot, was an easy target for ridicule. His opponent, incumbent senator Norm Coleman, was no prize package either. Judging from what his detractors said, they seemed less troubled by allegations of Coleman’s corruption 47 than they were repulsed by his bouffant hairdo, unnatural tan, and Chiclet teeth. The battle royal between these two characters turned quite a few voters off; rather than cast a ballot for Franken or Coleman, roughly 15 percent of voters chose to throw their vote to a third-party candidate with no chance of winning the election.
Everybody knew it would be a close race. Even so, the results were astonishing. The first returns, reported on election night, had Norm Coleman ahead by only 725 of the nearly three million votes cast: a margin of only about thirty-thousandths of a percent: 0.03 percent. The Associated Press declared Coleman the victor early in the morning, but quickly rescinded its announcement when news editors realized that the battle was far from over.
The morning after the election, a tired but confident Coleman declared victory: “Yesterday, the voters spoke. We prevailed.” He then suggested that Franken short-circuit