It looks like Al Franken may very well manage to steal Minnesota's Senate seat from Norm Coleman. I encourage you to check out this article by John Lott which has various visual aids -- the ballots themselves -- which demonstrate the depth of the thievery.
For example, who gets this vote:
You can see on the right that the voter managed to fill in circles next to specific names in other races, but in this race, they've darkened in the middle between Franken and Coleman's names. Who gets this vote? According to the canvassing board: Franken.
Lott outlines several other cases where the board has decided on one standard for determining intent when it comes to ballots for Coleman, but uses a much looser standard when it comes to "finding" ballots for Franken.
Once again, we have a race that falls within the margin of error. Despite all of the conspiracy theories and complaints, this is the one great advantage electronic voting machines have over punchcards, optical scan, etc. With the electronic ones, there's only 1 or 0. Electronic voting machines won't allow people to fill in the bubble between candidates names. Nor will it allow them to fill in one bubble and put an 'X' in another for the same race and leave the resulting Rorschach test for partisans to decide.
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