It's Florida all over again ... in Minnesota - part 2

Yep ... it's Florida 2000 all over again minus the hanging chads. This time the paper ballots had ovals to be filled in beside candidate names ... you know, kind of like taking an achievement test in school ... "fill in the bubbles."

Except some people didn't fill it completely in, some used a check mark, some doodled elsewhere on the ballot ... and all are being challenged.

The stakes are high because Democrats are only two shy of having a 60-vote super majority in the U.S. Senate. Georgia's incumbent Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss has a runoff election on December 2, and Minnesota's incumbent Republican Senator Norm Coleman is fighting to hold onto his win against Democrat/liberal activist Al Franken.

I published an earlier post pointing to Erick Erickson at Red State discussing the Minnesota recount and the fact that every "discovered" vote at that time had gone to Franken, something he called a statitistical improbability. What Mr. Erickson said was:

I spent six years as an elections lawyer. I handled a lot of very wacked election canvasses and recounts. One thing they all had in common: when new votes were found, they generally went both ways -- a few for one candidate and a few for the other candidate. It didn't quite follow the polling, but then close races only happen at the 50-50 margin.

Here's something that never happened: the votes did not all go 100% for one candidate except in the two instances where there was only one misplaced ballot discovered.

Mr. Erickson's latest post discusses Franken's attempts to change the rules after the election.

And so the challenges continue.