"Minneapolis Discovery Costs Franken":
What Maplewood giveth, Minneapolis taketh away.
Elections officials in Minnesota's largest city today discovered that one precinct came up 133 ballots short of election day totals, resulting in a net loss for Democratic challenger Al Franken of 36 votes.
The development wipes away what had been a boon for Franken in his bid to overtake Republican U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman, after Ramsey County officials found an additional 37 votes for Franken from a Maplewood precinct on Tuesday.
Minneapolis elections director Cindy Reichert said she believes the error occurred when election judges at the precinct on election night mistakenly ran ballots with write-in candidates through a counting machine twice. There were 129 such ballots.
Reichert said although the numbers do not match exactly, she is confident that that's what happened and will report those numbers to the Secretary of State's Office. She also detailed a search for any potential missing envelopes that contain ballots, including opening the counting machine, talking to election judges and calling the church where the polling place was located.
But, you don't understand, Ms. Reichart, you can only take votes away from Coleman and add votes to Franken....didn't you get your ACORN playbook?
An uproar Wednesday over 133 mystery ballots that may or may not have disappeared in Minneapolis became the newest controversy to roil the U.S. Senate recount.
At issue was a discrepancy between Election Day and recount totals in one of the city's precincts.
DFLer Al Franken's campaign lodged a protest over 133 votes that it said could not be accounted for during the recount, at a possible cost to him of as many as 46 net votes in his race against Republican Sen. Norm Coleman.
Franken officials sent a letter to the secretary of state's office and Minneapolis elections director Cindy Reichert demanding that the votes from the northeast Minneapolis precinct not be officially reported until a search is conducted for the ballots.
Late Wednesday, Reichert said she had decided to keep the results in the precinct open until all of the discrepancies could be resolved, by reviewing all of the precinct's election materials at City Hall today.
"Several mistakes were made in the precinct and we need to verify all of the numbers we looked at [Wednesday]," she said.
The twist came a day after Franken made a net gain of 37 votes in Ramsey County, when the recount there found that 171 votes from a Maplewood precinct hadn't been tallied on Election Day.
Wednesday evening, a Star Tribune tally showed Coleman with a 316-vote lead, with 98 percent of the vote recounted. At the start of the recount, Coleman had a 215-vote lead.
Earlier in the day, the Franken campaign announced that it was withdrawing 633 of the roughly 3,000 ballot challenges it had made during the recount. The campaign also said that its internal calculations showed it was now ahead of Coleman by 22 votes.
Apparently, not only is Franken not funny, he apparently cannot count, either.
Quit whining and give it up, Al. This isn't funny, either.
