Rubbish

Al Franken has truly plumbed a new depth in this recount business. His idea, in case you couldn't be bothered to watch the video, is to show the people who had their absentee ballots rejected. Even though they claim they didn't do anything wrong!  Never mind the fact that he even manages to exploit a quadriplegic for his own crass, political gains.  (Nicely done, Al.  Way to be diverse.  I can only imagine how that casting call went.  Franken's people's probably couldn't believe their luck and succumbed in a heap of spastic joy right there in the poor man's  living room )

Well, see here's the dealio, people.  If you don't fill out your ballot precisely as the election boards require, it's going to be rejected.  If you don't put your driver's license number on the envelope, it's going to be rejected, even if you don't have a driver's license.  How the hell is an election judge going to know that the reason you didn't fill that part out is because you don't have one?  They're going to assume that you messed up, and since they have no way of verifying who you are, it's going to be thrown into the slush pile.  There is nothing new or earth shattering about this.  The election officials NEED TO KNOW who you are, so that ballots are not being submitted willy nilly.  It's called "preventing election fraud," and if your ballot was properly rejected or improperly rejected makes no difference: there was something about it that set off alarm bells, hence it was rejected.  Duh.  It's not that hard, people.  I almost wasn't able to vote this election cycle because we'd just moved, and my driver's license did not have my current address on it.  I'd already applied for a new license----it just hadn't arrived yet and they weren't willing to take the piece of paper the DOT hands out as a temporary license in place of the real, laminated thing.  Fortunately, I had my new registration card and they were able to make it work that way. They need these bits of evidence to make sure that the process isn't corrupted.  That there is only one vote per person.  That there will be no ballot box stuffing.  It's just that simple.

If you assume that the bureaucracy is working for you, and that the burden is on them to get things right, I don't know what state you're living in because it sure as hell isn't Minnesota.   The burden is on you, and that means paying attention when there isn't a tight race, capisce?  It's your government after all, pay attention.  To illustrate this point, as I've mentioned before, during the 2004 presidential elections, I went to vote, but the husband couldn't, because he'd had his civil rights revoked per his DWI felony conviction. However, his name was still on the rolls, and he could have voted if he'd wanted to.  How do I know this?  Because I saw his name in the register, just below mine.  He didn't do it, but it became abundantly clear that the registrar hadn't been informed of his legal status at that point in time, even though it was more than a year since his revocation.  He was finally off the rolls in 2006, but there's obviously some lag time.  Earlier this year, when his civil rights were reinstated, the first thing he did was to register to vote, as he knew it might take some time to straighten things out.  Experience had proved as much.  

This is the thing that fries me about these recounts, and all the legal challenges that arise in their wake.  Every vote should be counted, yes.  But not every vote is for various reasons, and this happens all the time---it only matters when the race is close.  Everyone was shocked when it was released that there were thirty some ballots in the back seat of some election judge's car.  They weren't secure!  Are they fake?  They weren't secured!  How do we know they're for real? and so on and so forth.  This happens all the time with elections.  This isn't anything new.  Elections are messy things.  There is a lot of paper involved.  They are run, by and large, with volunteer help.   Things we don't generally like, such as the questionable security of ballots, will generally happen in such an event.  But we don't care about such irregularities when a race is a blowout.  We don't care about rejected ballots then.  We assume that everything was copacetic.  Most people move on with their lives and don't think twice about it.  But when things don't go as planned, and the race is tight as it can possibly be, well, EVERY VOTE SHOULD COUNT, DAMMIT! 

Allow me be a bit of a stick in the mud here, but no, every vote should not count because not every vote is valid.  I'm not talking about the content.  I'm talking about the fact that people don't fill their ballots out properly.  They don't sign them.  They don't provide accurate information.  They've moved and they give the wrong address.  Whatever. If these people had shown up at the polls, they wouldn't have been allowed to vote at all, so why should the fact that they submitted absentee ballots be any different?  The only reason the people in the video above knew their ballots hadn't been counted, I'd wager, was because Al Franken's campaign contacted them.  Look, I've got some experience with this.  Back in the day, I was on the All University Election Committee at Iowa State.  I worked on one student election (actually two, because the original results were contested), which doesn't really compare with actual elections, but there are a number of base similarities---in that people need to be eligible to vote, and if they fill their ballot out incorrectly, said ballot is automatically rejected. Fair or unfair, as you please, but it is necessary that there be no doubt about the results.  Integrity is essential, because, if the whole system breaks down, so does our democracy, and it's irrelevant as to whether it's an election for a college student body president, or if it's a presidential race.  If the process has integrity, people will know their vote, most likely, counted, and they will have faith in the results.  If people don't have faith in the results, if they think the system has been gamed somehow, they will not take their place in our democracy, which is participatory in nature and needs them to survive.  It's absolutely essential.  For all that happened with Bush v. Gore in 2000, for all that was said and done, for all their bluster, the people who believed that particular race was stolen nevertheless still participated in the system.  They became activists, rather than secessionists.  That is important. 

When there's a tight race, rank, stinking partisanship becomes the judge, jury and executioner of the integrity of elections.  This is not good, to put it mildly, and it fries me whenever these recounts happen because the subsequent behavior of the candidates and their surrogates is absolutely inexcusable.  They deem it necessary to call the entire system into question to serve their own aims, yet when the dust settles, they never do anything to help shore up the integrity of the same system they challenged when it served their purposes to do so.