Mischief In Minnesota: Dems Still Working To Steal Senate Seat

The Op-Ed Board at the Wall Street Journal is now looking into the recount oddities going on in the Senate race up in Minnesota. There are too many strange things happening for anyone to look at it and not think anything of it. Given that the Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie is a partisan Democrat and has ties to the fraud-laden voter registration group ACORN, alot of what has been happening up there simply cannot be chalked up to "oversights" and "mistakes."

From the WSJ:

The vanishing Coleman vote came during a week in which election officials are obliged to double-check their initial results. Minnesota is required to do these audits, and it isn't unusual for officials to report that they transposed a number here or there. In a normal audit, these mistakes could be expected to cut both ways. Instead, nearly every "fix" has gone for Mr. Franken, in some cases under strange circumstances. For example, there was Friday night's announcement by Minneapolis's director of elections that she'd forgotten to count 32 absentee ballots in her car. The Coleman campaign scrambled to get a county judge to halt the counting of these absentees, since it was impossible to prove their integrity 72 hours after the polls closed. The judge refused on grounds that she lacked jurisdiction. Up in Two Harbors, another liberal outpost, Mr. Franken picked up an additional 246 votes. In Partridge Township, he racked up another 100. Election officials in both places claim they initially miscommunicated the numbers. Odd, because in the Two Harbors precinct, none of the other contests recorded any changes in their vote totals. According to conservative statistician John Lott, Mr. Franken's gains so far are 2.5 times the corrections made for Barack Obama in the state, and nearly three times the gains for Democrats across Minnesota Congressional races. Mr. Lott notes that Mr. Franken's "new" votes equal more than all the changes for all the precincts in the entire state for the Presidential, Congressional and statehouse races combined (482 votes).

Statistically, things are not adding up properly.

And why is Ritchie's involvement making this whole thing even more suspect?

One of Mr. Ritchie's financial supporters during his 2006 run for office was a 527 group called the Secretary of State Project, which was co-founded by James Rucker, who came from MoveOn.org. The group says it is devoted to putting Democrats in jobs where they can "protect elections." Mr. Ritchie is also an ally of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or Acorn, of fraudulent voter-registration fame. That relationship might explain why prior to the election Mr. Ritchie waved off evidence of thousands of irregularities on Minnesota voter rolls, claiming that accusations of fraud were nothing more than "desperateness" from Republicans.

If the Democrats are allowed to steal this election, it will signal the opening of a very
bad era in American politics in which the people can have their votes cancelled out by the fraud mechanisms being out in place by leftist groups such as MoveOn.org, ACORN and the Secretary of State Project.

I hope everyone is watching.

You can access the complete column on-line here:

Mischief In Minnesota?
The Wall Street Journal
November 12, 2008

Will The Dems Steal The Senate Race In Minnesota?

It is starting to look like the Gubernatorial race in Washington State back in 2004. Remember that? The Dems kept taking the election results back to court until enough votes were "found" in order to give the Democrats the win. Dino Rossi was the declared winner until the third and final recount declared Christine Gregoire the winner. During the lawsuits of the recount prcess, the Dems were "finding" new votes everywhere, many of them questionable at best, but were allowed by Democrat-appointed judges who were overseeing the case.

Now, it looks like Al Franken and the Dems are going to do the same thing in Minnesota where Norm Coleman has apparently won the vote, but the recounts are starting to look eerily similar to the Washington State election in 2004.

Matthew Vadum at the American Spectator has some good information on how the Dems might pull off another Gregoire. It turns out that Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie is a Democrat who has strong ties to ACORN and ACORN happened to have endorsed Al Franken in this election.

Let's meet Mr. Ritchie:



From Matthew's column:

Minnesota's secretary of state isn't a Democrat by happenstance. Ritchie, who defeated two-term incumbent Republican Mary Kiffmeyer in 2006, received an endorsement and financial assistance for his run from a below-the-radar non-federal "527" group called the Secretary of State Project. The entity can accept unlimited financial contributions and doesn't have to disclose them publicly until well after the election. The founders of the Secretary of State Project, which claims to advance "election protection" but only backs Democrats, religiously believe that right-leaning secretaries of state helped the GOP steal the presidential elections in Florida in 2000 (Katherine Harris) and in Ohio in 2004 (Ken Blackwell).

That already looks sinister enough. But it goes even deeper:

In the election on Tuesday, Ritchie said his office "received no reports whatsoever of fraudulent voting occurring," but most news reports omitted the fact that a conservative watchdog group called Minnesota Majority repeatedly urged Ritchie to clean up the state's voter data. The group urged "a thorough review and verification of all voter registration records." Minnesota Majority claimed last month that there were thousands of irregularities in voter lists, including 261,000 duplicative registrations and 63,000 voters listing an address that the post office reported was "non-deliverable." Ritchie was dismissive.

Of course he was dismissive. Would a Democrat actually look into voter fraud if such fraud seemed like it was going to help a Democrat win an election? Not in this lifetime. Look at how Gregoire was handed the Governorship of Washington State by Democrat-appointed judges who allowed very questionalble votes to be counted. Ritchie and Franken are probably looking at the very same plan right now.

And the media isn't being completely forthcoming with the story either:

Most media reports also leave out the fact that Ritchie has extensive ties to the controversial in-your-face direct action group, ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), whose employees have been implicated in electoral fraud time and time again. In 2006, the Minnesota ACORN Political Action Committee endorsed Ritchie and donated to his campaign. According to the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board, contributors to Ritchie's campaign included liberal philanthropists George Soros, Drummond Pike, and Deborah Rappaport, along with veteran community organizer Heather Booth, a Saul Alinsky disciple who co-founded the Midwest Academy, a radical ACORN clone. One article on Ritchie's 2006 campaign website brags about the fine work ACORN did in Florida to pass a constitutional amendment to raise that state's minimum wage.

And the parting shot, that we should all take heed of:

As the politically astute Joseph Stalin once remarked, "The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything."

You can access the complete article on-line here:

SOS In Minnesota
Matthew Vadum
The American Spectator
November 7, 2008

UPDATE: Apparently, Mr. Ritchie "found" another hundred votes for Franken. If he "finds" 300 more, he will declare Franken the winner.