MINNESOTA CRAZY

Posted at 9:12 a.m. ET

Professor Steven E. Schier of Carleton College has a remarkable take on the U.S. Senate election, recount, and upcoming court challenge in Minnesota.  The race has incumbent Republican Norm Coleman challenged by rarely funny comedian Al Franken.  Published in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, this will not increase your reverence for democracy:

Will of the people? Er . . . no. Accidental Senator? Absolutely. That’s the certain result of the recount nightmare currently occurring in our state.

The basic problem can be simply stated. The margin of error that Minnesota’s election system provides is simply larger than that margin of victory in the 2008 Minnesota Senate race. That means the winner of the race is certainly the product of chance error.

And that also carries a particularly disturbing implication. The counties and localities where our election system functioned most poorly – through lost ballots, newly found ballots, and wrongly rejected absentee ballots – created a disproportionately large number of the random errors that produced the outcome.

It’s as if we decided that the Senate race should be determined by the worst election procedures in the state, because, at the end of the day, that is what has happened.

Nothing like laying it on the line.

It’s no wonder that the last close statewide recount in 1964 wasn’t decided until more than four months after Election Day, and that it was decided in court, not by the canvassing process. We have to look forward to a similar dragged out process in 2009.

Well, Franken has waited in the wings before.  It won't hurt him.

There are procedural solutions to avoid recount nightmares like this in the future. One, now on track to be employed in Minneapolis city elections this year, would have avoided our current Senate election uncertainties. In this system, voters rank order their preferences among several candidates, and if their first choice falls below a threshold of votes, their second choice would then be counted. This allows all voters to express a preference that counts in the final vote; no wasted votes result. Imagine if the over 437,000 votes garnered by Dean Barkley had their second choices allocated among Coleman and Franken. Their votes would count, whereas in the recount they are ignored, and the outcome in all probability would be clearer.

Another alternative is to have a runoff election if the margin between the top two candidates is small – say, under 5,000 votes – or if either candidate fails to get 50 percent of the vote. Georgia, with its 50 percent threshold law, held a runoff election in early December, producing a decisive winner from among the top two candidates.

We have lived with the legacy of elections so close that we can never be sure of the outcome. 

In 1960, John F. Kennedy narrowly won the presidential election over Richard Nixon despite disputed vote totals from several states, particularly Alabama and Illinois. Allegedly, when Kennedy met Nixon for the first time after Election Day, he said: “Well Dick, we’ll never really know who won the election, will we?”

We Minnesotans will never really know, either. Whether he’s Senator Franken or Senator Coleman, the winner is surely Senator Accidental.

I recall walking with friends through the streets of Chicago at 5 a.m., the day after the 1960 election.  The Chicago Sun-Times came out with a headline:  

IT'S KENNEDY 

An hour later the paper came out with a new headline:

IS IT KENNEDY?

And that's the way it's been left for almost half a century. 

Professor Schier makes good sense.

January 8, 2009.