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On the MN Senate Recount

For those of you not watching the news, there is a huge recount going on in the US Senate race here in Minnesota. The two candiates are less than 300 votes apart (I’d give the number the paper says, but it changes every day).

They have been allowing candidates to “challenge” ballots, meaning, put them in a pile for review. Some of them are designed to get them challenged and removed as a valid ballot, others are to be challenge to try to get them added as a ballot.

What is very quickly becoming a judgement call, is creating a question with the state board that decides this… What is a valid balot? The law doesn’t say what to do percisely. So my bet is, the idiots will do something like have 9 people look at it, and if 5 say aye, it’s good. This is not the right way to do it my mind.

In fact, the way they should do it is rather simple.

The question is whether or not the ballot should be counted towards anybody. So here’s what you do. You go and get 2 voter machines (3 if you really want to play it safe). You take the stack of contested ballots and put load it in. You then run them through all the machines. If all the machines come back with the same answer… That is what you use. If not, you figure out what ballots are sometimes getting read one way, and sometimes getting read another, and then use your judgement on them.

Why is that the best option?

Because a valid vote was defined by the machine, even if it wasn’t defined in state law. And if people who voted failed to play by the rules of the machine, that’s their fault.

So there’s my two cents… Leave it to the computer who’s job it was to do it in the first place. And while your at it… You’ll get it done in half the time.

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