Proofiness - Charles Seife [58]
Every time there’s a dispute about a very close election, the candidates behave in the same way. Logic forbids them from doing otherwise. The candidate who’s behind by a handful of votes has to figure out some way to make up the difference between his tally and his opponent’s and get into the lead. There aren’t very many ways of doing this. You can try to get officials to toss out a block of votes that favor your opponent. Conversely, you can plump for including a rejected block of votes that favor you. Politicians seldom take the first tack; trying to disenfranchise voters makes you look slimier than usual. However, the second strategy is very attractive. The moment a politician is behind in a contested election, he makes high-minded speeches about how every vote in a great democracy must be counted. As he waves the flag and make orotund pronouncements about justice and fairness and the blood of our founding fathers, almost nobody notices that he’s acting in his own very selfish interest when he tries to get those votes counted. And this is precisely what Al Franken’s lawyers did. “There is no more precious right in a democracy than casting your vote and having it counted,” Franken lawyer David Lillehaug bloviated on the day before the start of the recount. He urged the canvassing board to tally a large number of absentee ballots that had been rejected by officials. Count every vote!
For the candidate who’s in the lead, the strategy has to be exactly the opposite; he has to undermine the challenger’s champion-of-the-disenfranchised posturing. He declares victory based upon the first returns and tries to make it look as if the opponent were trying to steal the election by bending the rules of a fair election. He fights any of the challenger’s attempts to tally more votes, because more votes (unless he knows they’re favorable) have the potential to eradicate his fragile lead. Hence, Coleman’s team immediately had to attempt to block the extra absentee ballots from being counted—and they had to do it without making Coleman seem like a complete ass. Not easy. “It’s actually the responsibility of the voter to make sure that the vote goes where it’s supposed to go,” scoffed Coleman counsel Fritz Knaak when asked about the disenfranchised absentee voters. A more sympathetic lawyer would have spun the issue a little better: he would have portrayed Coleman as the law-and-order candidate, who simply holds the rule of law as sacred. It’s no shame to be strict about rules and regulations, and if your candidate is trying to count dubious ballots, strictness is your friend. If a person didn’t get his improperly cast vote counted, it’s a shame, but rules are rules, after all.
Those were the ideological positions at the beginning of the recount, and as a result, the absentee ballots became a political and legal football—and Minnesota was swimming in absentee ballots. In the 2008 election, there were about 300,000 absentee votes—roughly 10 percent of the votes received. About 12,000 were rejected for a variety of reasons. Sometimes those reasons were valid. Sometimes the ballot came from a voter who wasn’t registered. Sometimes the voter didn’t sign the envelope containing the ballot or, even more commonly, failed to get a witness to sign the envelope; both signatures are required by Minnesota law. But quite a few of those 12,000 rejected ballots, numbering in the hundreds