Friday, November 26, 2010

Let’s just toss a few votes out at random

That’s Tom Emmer’s legal team to the Minnesota Supreme Court. You see, there are a few more votes in the governor’s race than were recorded as signed in voters on election day. Admittedly, not the optimum situation; maybe the recount will go at least some distance to explaining the discrepancy.

The Supreme Court summarily dismissed the Emmer camp proposal to throw votes out prior to a recount, as it should have. It was a stupid, Hail Mary idea, and unconstitutional, to boot, as Professor David Scultz describes:

Finally, assume that we do have to do reconciliation if there are discrepancies as Emmer alleges. The stated statutory remedy is randomly removing ballots. If that were to occur I think the state law is unconstitutional. By that [I mean], if voting is a fundamental right protected by the First and Fourteenth Amendments (and that is true), subjecting voters to random denial of having their ballot counted because of election official counting errors or mis- or maladministration is clearly a denial of a right to vote.

Professor Schultz also describes in his post why Emmer cannot win, even with “reconciliation,” unless, in addition to the Constitution, the rules of arithmetic are suspended.

Update: Of course, the Emmerians only want to do it in selected counties.

5 comments:

Dave Puskala said...

The rules of arithmetic?  I suppose you were one of those radicals that wanted to impose them his budget proposals, too.

James K said...

As opposed to letting him pull numbers out of his a....er hat?  Yep, you betcha. 

DiscordianStooge said...

So are there any obvious reasons why there could be more votes than signed in voters? Voter fraud seems to be an unlikely reason; basically one would have to steal an extra ballot, right? So how does it happen?

blogspotdog said...

Both voting and its administration are human enterprises. Human enterprises are fraught with error.

DiscordianStooge said...

Human beings are perfectly created by the Ceiling Cat. How dare you! ;)