black…MYstory

Okay, this story doesn’t have much to do with anything except that I was amused by reading it.  Stories like this make me wonder why so many people think that you have to be some smart or exceptional person to be a politician.

To set this up, the Senate contest in Minnesota is still not over.  The election results, after a recount, went in favor of Democratic challenger Al Franken.  However, as it is his legal right to do, the incumbent, Norm Coleman, is challenging the results in court, claiming, among other things, that some of the people who voted for him had their ballots tossed illegally.  In other words,  the challenges to their votes had no merit.

So, one would think that, if you were to bring in some of these voters as witnesses in this trial, they would clearly exemplify what you’re trying to prove, right?  It appears that concept escaped Coleman’s crack legal team.

Talking Points Memo gives us highlights of two witnesses that Coleman claims were disenfranchised.  Here’s one winner they picked:

One of the voters was Douglas Thompson, who admitted under oath that his girlfriend filled out his absentee ballot application for him, signing his name with her own hand and purporting to be himself. His ballot was rejected because the signature on his ballot envelope (his own) did not match the signature on the application (his girlfriend’s). The Coleman team’s argument appears to be that he is still a legal voter in Minnesota, as the signature on the ballot was his own, even if admitted dishonesty was involved in getting the ballot.

Errmm…okay.  He couldn’t fill out his own ballot application?  Now, walk through this with me.  You have my ballot application.  It’s filled out in my wife’s neat handwriting but, you have no reason to think that it’s not my handwriting and that I actually filled it out.  Now, you get my ballot and the signature looks more like a prescription.  You compare the two and determine that the two don’t match so, what do you do?  My guess: you follow Minnesota law, err on the side of caution and toss it.

Okay, so the team shot themselves in the foot with this one so, how do they follow up?  They shoot themselves in the other foot:

Another one of the voters, an older man named Wesley Briest, initially responded that he voted at the polls — not by absentee. Then Coleman attorney James Langdon showed him his absentee ballot envelope, reminding him that he did not go to the polls, too. Upon cross-examination by Franken lawyer Kevin Hamilton, Briest admitted that his wife, who served as the witness on his ballot, did not fully complete the witness section of the absentee ballot.

Now, here, you have a man complaining about a challenge to his absentee ballot but can’t remember that he voted absentee.  It later is discovered that the witness portion was not completed so, the ballot gets tossed, per the law.

Basically, the Coleman team gets unintentionally owned by their own witnesses.  I hate to put it like this but, given this display, the people of Minnesota might want someone with a scant more intellectual prowess as their Senator.

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