The fate of the Lizard People
So, the ruling we’ve all been waiting for in the great Franken — Coleman Senate recount, as expressed by Mark Evanier, of, um, Groo fame? Is it okay if I chiefly credit him for his work with Groo as opposed to the rest of his career?…
This morning, the Minnesota Election Board tossed out a ballot with a write-in for “The Lizard People” because, apparently, that was a plural. The voter had voted for more than one person in an office and it was therefore an “overvote.” On the other hand, there was a voter who wrote in “Flying Spaghetti Monster” for some office. That didn’t void the ballot and since that voter voted for Al Franken for the Senate seat, Franken picked up a vote. If the individual who voted for “The Lizard People” had voted for “One Lizard Person,” that would have been okay.
This doesn’t make sense to me. I tend to think “Lizard People” votes should be counted for Franken, though I wouldn’t think it is an affront against Democracy if it were discounted, but “Lizard Person” strikes me as slightly more likely to be a vote than “Lizard People” since we are voting, hypothetically, for single persons here to represent Minnesota in the US Senate. (Note: as I explained previously, the reason I would discount the vote to “Lizard People” and count it as a vote for Franken is that the voter did not fill in “lizard people” next to the write-in slot, nor filled in an oval in that spot. But I have to say that this diversion to single entity and plural entity does seem backward in its logic.)
It seems that Franken is on pace to win this election, Coleman’s frivulous challenges proving to be more frivulous than Franken’s frivulous challenges, which skewed the reported vote tallies. The great thing about this process, though, is that people keep keeping the world abreast on the specific count and at any given time, we see that Coleman is up by five votes, or — as just linked – two votes, or Franken is up by “high double digits”,  — and not one of these figures means the slightest thing, yet they just keep coming. If I had a free slab of time and nothing more important or more interesting to do with it, I’d try and compile blogging news on these miniscule vote count announcements. The process actually strikes me as pretty well insulated from the politicking that’s going on, and thus the miniscule election margin definitive enough to count as final. And that statement almost leads me to hope Coleman wins by three — even if the seat almost looks like it’ll be vacated in that even in a few months as the FBI is investigating Norm right now.
December 19th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
For instance: Franken up by two votes. Just saw it at “bradblog”, linking to the associated press.
And also I note that the politics1.com rss feed for today’s entry has a headline with Coleman up by five, but the site itself was updated to Coleman up by six.
This is great, isn’t it?