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The long-running battle for Minnesota's Senate seat is finally over. Democracy – and Al Franken – won fair and square
By Brad Friedman
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 30 June 2009 23.00 BST
Minnesota's next senator: Al Franken finally has something to celebrate. Photograph: Jim Mone/AP
In the end, the conspiracy theories became so laughable that the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee (RSCC) quietly removed its own "Minnesota Recount" website, once it became clear that no, the Democratic candidate Al Franken was not "stealing" the US Senate election in Minnesota, as the Republican party had been shamefully declaring, without actual evidence, for weeks following election day back on 4 November 2008.
Nearly eight months on from election day, Franken finally got to celebrate his election as Minnesota's next US senator after the defeated Republican incumbent Norm Coleman dropped his quixotic legal challenge, and the state's Republican governor announced he was going to formally approve Franken's victory.
Although the victory was sealed today, the Republican claims of "voter fraud" became impossible to support long ago, because hand-marked paper ballots – nearly three million of them – as cast by the voters in the squeaker of an election, were actually being counted, in full view of the media and any interested citizen alike. To a ballot, they were all accounted for, and any disagreement about voter intent on those ballots was adjudicated in an open process by a bipartisan state canvassing board. All but a handful of those votes were determined unanimously by the board to have been cast either for Franken, for Coleman, for a third party candidate or for nobody at all.
The only question remaining after the weeks-long, painstaking, public hand-count was whether a number of uncounted absentee ballots, rejected as per the state's strict standards for counting, should, in fact, be counted.
A tripartisan, three-judge panel took their time, in yet another fully public process, in reviewing evidence and hearing witness testimony presented by both sides. A few hundred more ballots were deemed to be legitimate and improperly rejected, and those too were then publicly counted – the counting again witnessed by all – and added to the final tally.
Hand-counted paper ballots proved, yet again, to be the gold standard in this election, which the state canvassing board, the three-judge election contest panel and now the state's supreme court has affirmed as won by Franken, the former radio talkshow host and comedian, by a mere 312 votes.
Minnesota's excellent election law, requiring both the secretary of state and the governor to sign the election certification only after all election contests are settled in the state, has assured that the next senator from Minnesota will not serve under a cloud of suspicion. Only the most insane and/or disingenuous could challenge the findings from one of the longest and most transparent election hand-counts in the history of the US. Click here for the rest of the story.
