Proofiness - Charles Seife [56]
The unavoidable errors inherent to counting ballots would have been enough to cast doubt upon the outcome of the election. What made the election really contentious was the way partisans on both sides maneuvered to try to get their opponents’ votes thrown out.
When the recount began, roughly two weeks after the election, the myth of “Minnesota nice” was still alive. Ramsey County’s elections manager, Joe Mansky, kicked off the recount in his county by explaining the procedure for the recount: election workers would tally ballots for Franken and Coleman, while two partisan observers, one Republican and one Democrat, would observe. If either observer disagreed with how a ballot was counted, he could issue a “challenge,” and the ballot would be labeled and stored in an envelope. These challenges, Mansky said, should be exceedingly rare. “I’ve been before the state canvassing board seventeen times,” he announced. “During that time period, I think there may have been ten challenged ballots go to them . . . and the reason for that is that most Minnesotans know how to mark our ballots properly, and even the very few who don’t put their mark so close to the candidate’s name that there is absolutely no question about who they have voted for.” The surrounding crowd—elections officials, partisan observers, and the press—nodded in agreement. Everybody was being very neighborly.
It lasted less than an hour. Within minutes, challenges were piling up. At one table, sparks were flying. A mustachioed observer in a plaid flannel shirt and voluminous pants cinched tight with a drawstring challenged ballots on absurd pretexts, hoping to disenfranchise voters who supported the Democrat. At one point, he challenged several ballots where the little Scantron ovals were clearly bubbled in for Al Franken. But, he argued, the mark was a tiny shade lighter than the other marks on the page, rendering them invalid.
Despite election officials’ best efforts to keep a lid on the number of challenged ballots, the numbers kept rising and rising all around the state. Both campaigns were responsible; for every pro-Coleman knucklehead (like the one in Ramsey County) making frivolous challenges, there was a pro-Franken dimwit doing exactly the same thing (like one in Stearns County who was such a nuisance that the county issued a press release about her antics). “Both sides are behaving badly,” said Mark Halvorson, an election observer from the nonpartisan Citizens for Election Integrity Minnesota. “One starts and the other escalates.” By the end of the recount—even after both sides had withdrawn some of the more ludicrous claims—each side had challenged more than three thousand ballots, each of which had to go before the canvassing board for final adjudication.
The canvassing board, composed of four judges along with the Minnesota secretary of state, was flabbergasted. With nearly seven thousand challenged votes, it would have taken several weeks of mind-numbing effort to go through them all. And the vast majority of these challenges were completely bogus—a total waste of time. In hopes of speeding up the process, the canvassing board begged the campaigns to withdraw the sillier challenges. But both sides were reluctant to withdraw their challenges. There was a cynical reason behind this: proofiness.
Every evening at 9 p.m. Minnesota time, the state released the results of each day’s recount—but the challenged ballots were removed from the official tallies. This meant that the campaigns could manipulate the totals with frivolous challenges: every time a Franken operative challenged a Coleman ballot, it would reduce Coleman’s tally by one vote, and vice versa. Both campaigns