Thursday, December 18, 2008

MN Mayhem

I'm watching the live stream of the Minnesota State Canvassing Board recounting individual ballots. (I'd give you the link, but they'll be done by the time you click on it.) The Board is confused about whether they've resolved a challenge to a particular ballot already. Three members of the Board were just standing over piles of ballots, flipping them over and putting them in different piles. Now Coleman's attorney is arguing about whether they resolved the challenge yesterday or not. Now both attorneys are standing up with the Board watching them dig through piles of ballots.

How can this possibly all be done correctly? The Board's been running through challenges all day -- I watched a bit earlier -- and they do most of them in about 20 seconds or less, and the results are noted down somewhere, but now they're arguing about which challenges have been resolved, whether the results have been properly noted down, which notations are typos, and so on.

In a race that's currently separated by about 40 votes (as counted by the MN Star Tribune), it just seems impossible that they're going to resolve it accurately with all this chaotic counting going on. Even if all the challenges are accurately resolved, I don't see how they can accurately tabulate the results.

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