Al Franken to count every vote, no matter how bogus (hanging chads are back!)

Some of Al Franken's teenage, pet, and foreign citizen voters probably don't remember all the fun we've had with "hanging chads", "pregnant chads", "flying chads", the "undervote", et al in the past. Under that telepathic process, Democratic poll workers determined whether someone who hadn't voted for president but who had voted for other offices had actually intended to vote for Al Gore or Al Gore. Well, now they're back, as Al Franken intends to count every vote, no matter how absolutely bogus (link, see also this):

In [the 2000 election] context, it made a little more sense. A significant number of ballots carried votes from down-ticket races but not for the presidential election. This set off an effort to glean supposed voter intent through checking for “pregnant chads”, those punch card selections that didn’t dislodge the paper chip for the correct slot. The operational theory was that the punch-card system somehow cheated the voter out of registering his/her vote, despite the decades of use that punch-card systems had and the clear instructions given to voters to punch all the way through the card and check their ballots when finished... In this case, it makes no sense at all. First, we use optical-scan systems, not punch-card ballots, which are far simpler to complete. Second, the Senate race was not at the top of the ballot. Obama voters didn’t necessarily support Franken

Meanwhile, the story about a worker holding ballots in her car is completely false. They were always under complete and absolute control, no funny business at all!

Meanwhile, another Franken joke! From this:

Team Franken lied when they said today that an 84 year old stroke victim’s ballot had been rejected because of her signature.

Posted in StuartSmalley at November 13, 2008 07:50 PM