Lawsuit All but Assured in Minnesota

Top lawyers for Norm Coleman's campaign have said that a lawsuit is virtually certain in the Minnesota Senate election. Reading between the lines, this suggests that they have de facto conceded defeat in the actual vote counting. If you were expecting to get more votes than the other guy, why would you even talk about filing a suit? There has been nary a word about lawsuits from the Franken camp, just a prediction that Frank will win by 35-50 votes. Coleman will have an uphill struggle because the Minnesota supreme court has denied every motion he has brought before it so far. It is clear the court does not want to settle the election. It wants the canvassing board to do so and it seems unlikely it will overturn the canvassing board's decision unless Coleman can show the board violated state law. In any event, no suit will be filed until the 1600 absentee ballots in dispute have been counted and that won't happen until January 5. So Minnesota will start the new session of Congress with one senator. There should have been some provision in the constitution that when a senate seat is vacant, the other senator gets two votes so the state is not disadvantaged, but there isn't.

Final Presidential Results

Not a lot of political news on Christmas day, but here is some reworked old news. Below are the final results (taken from the Wikipedia's presidential election page). In a few cases, the rounding is slightly different from the earlier results posted here. The map software uses integers, so for each candidate, the percentage of the total vote was computed and rounded to the nearest integer, then the map drawn. This algorithm could give slightly different results in a few cases than doing all the computations to several decimal places. If you want to play with the data, they are available in Excel format and .csv format. For example, you could sort the states by Nader's percentage or whatever. These files are also on the Data galore page (on the menu) in case you want them in the future. Nebraska is colored purple below because although McCain got more votes in the state than Obama, Obama won one of the electoral votes (NE-02).

Qualifications to be Senator from New York

A lot has been written about Caroline Kennedy's (lack of) qualifications to be a senator. However, Bob Beneson asks since when has prior experience in elected office been a requirement for this seat? The previous five occupants of the seat were Bobby Kennedy (1965-1968), Charles Goodell (1968-1971), James Buckley (1971-1977), Daniel Moynihan (1977-2001), and Hillary Clinton (2001-2009). Of these, the only one who had been elected to public office before entering the Senate is Charles Goodell, and Goodell wasn't elected to the seat, he was appointed to it after the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. There are certainly valid arguments against Caroline Kennedy, but her lack of experience in elected office isn't one of them given that 4 of the previous 5 occupants of the seat didn't have any and the one who did is not likely to show up on many lists of the greatest senators of all time.

Blog on Pardoning

On the Internet, there is no such thing as a subject too specialized to blog on. Rick Hasen, a professor of law at Loyola University, has been running a respected blog on election law since 2003. It covers all facets of election law, for example, yesterday he talked about a voting machine company that has been trying to intimidate a Princeton professor who is an expert witness in a case about the voting machines. The site was getting about 12,000 visits a month early this year, but traffic has spiked the past few months. But there are even narrower blogs out there. An Illinois political science professor, P.S. Ruckman, Jr., has a blog on the pardon power. The feature article yesterday was entitled "Can a President Revoke a Pardon He Has Granted?" (If this doesn't ring a bell, check out yesterday's posting here.) Ruckman's traffic has quintupled in the past four days. His 15 minutes of fame has arrived.

Viagra as a Weapon against Terrorism

OK, this is not directly political news, but it is a slow news day and the story was too good to pass up. The CIA is using Viagra as a weapon for fighting terrorism in Afghanistan. The CIA has operatives in Afghanistan who are trying to sign up elderly local chieftains to rat on local terrorists. The traditional ways to encourage cooperation are to give the chieftains guns or cash. The problem is that the guns often fall into the wrong hands and cash quickly gets spent on fancy toys that signal to everyone in the area that the chieftain has a rich new friend (which they realize is the CIA), making the chieftain now useless as an information source. The little blue pills don't leave any tell-tale signs behind and the chieftain often wants more--which he can get in trade for information the CIA wants. It is a win-win proposition.

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