I don't think we can say that things are over yet in Minnesota, but we could be inching closer to another confirmation of the GOP's rock bottom status. If Al Franken is elected a Senator, I think we can officially say that things can't possibly get any worse.
What are the broader lessons here? One of the big problems it seems we face is that we keep losing votes after Election Day. On the day after the election, Obama's Presidential margin stood at under 6 points. Now, it's 7.3 according to RealClearPolitics. A lot of this is West Coast absentees and provisionals. But the reality is that it's going to be very, very difficult to succeed in recounts if we tolerate 1 to 1.5 points of slippage in overall vote counts after Election Day, usually in their direction. And MN-SEN isn't even the worst. Remember when we suddenly lost OH-15 by more than 2,000 votes when they decided to count 26,000 Franklin County provisionals a month after the election? And I don't even need to remind you about WA-GOV in 2004, when a governor was elected courtesy of votes found in closets.
Even if some of these votes are counted legitimately (the Ohio provisions example), we are inviting a crisis of confidence in our election system if it looks like the winner is dependent on the time we count ballots: usually a Republican on the day of the election when standard procedures are followed, and then a Democrat after protracted recounts and court battles.
We must insist on basic good government reforms to increase confidence in election results. Some of these might be done federally (as amendments to HAVA) and others will need to go state by state.
- Full electronic voting with a paper trail audit. There's a reason Paul Carmouche didn't challenge a 356-vote margin in LA-4: because the voting was 100% electronic. Critics have made good points about the lack of a paper trail on many of these machines. But MN-SEN shows that optical scan ballots, preferable only to hanging chads, are not fulproof. While plenty of bugs have been demonstrated on e-voting machines, there's no evidence (to date) of actual votes being mis-counted or lost -- and a paper trail should greatly improve the detection and resolution of these issues in real time.
- All ballots counted within 72 hours. It shouldn't take weeks to count absentees and provisionals. Let's set a reasonable window for counting every vote -- like 72 or 96 hours -- understanding that this might be different in states that are largely vote-by-mail.
- Zero tolerance for lost-and-found votes. Negligence in handling voted ballots should be made a misdemeanor offense at a minimum. Election officials should pay heavy fines and face removal for incidents like the 133 "lost" Minneapolis ballots. Heavy legal penalties should be a deterrent to "losing" ballots that are then "found" at conveninent points in a recount.
- An open election results standard. I want this for other reasons, but a bunch of tech people should get together to formulate a standard for the reporting of real-time precinct election results in XML that also covers 1) reporting status of absentees and provisionals, and 2) historical precinct data, including notional numbers from census block counts for re-precincted areas. For all precincts, we should know how many voters are registered to get a real sense of voter turnout as well as how many people voted in this precinct in the last few elections. Practically, this means that the spotting of anomalies can be crowdsourced to the online community. If turnout seems abnormally high or low for a precinct, we can know in real time.
The GOP, with the help of sites like Election Journal, has made it a priority to detect and prevent voter fraud before and during elections -- but we lack a similarly systematic approach to prevent the stealing of elections after the fact. (Arguably, such a strategy would have more of an impact.) More than a handful of races this year were in recounts or in limbo until after Election Day, and at the Senate level, all have been decided for the Democrat or are trending that way (Alaska, Oregon, and now possibly Minnesota).
