Nothing about the following story should surprise you. With the caveat that the findings come from a conservative watchdog group, it would seem that a number of felons voted illegally for Al Franken in the 2008 Minnestota Senate election.
The six-month election recount that turned former “Saturday Night Live” comedian Al Franken into a U.S. senator may have been decided by convicted felons who voted illegally in Minnesota’s Twin Cities.
That’s the finding of an 18-month study conducted by Minnesota Majority, a conservative watchdog group, which found that at least 341 convicted felons in largely Democratic Minneapolis-St. Paul voted illegally in the 2008 Senate race between Franken, a Democrat, and his Republican opponent, then-incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman.
The final recount vote in the race, determined six months after Election Day, showed Franken beat Coleman by 312 votes — fewer votes than the number of felons whose illegal ballots were counted, according to Minnesota Majority’s newly released study, which matched publicly available conviction lists with voting records.Click the link above to read the details if you are curious.
What is most annoying about these (unexpected!) findings is that one just knew that such shenanigans were in the mix as soon as the election was close. It is critical for a democracy to function that elections remain free of such corruption. The tenet that “if the people elected don’t do the will of the people they will be voted out of office” only holds true if those elected don’t control the elections.
Such charges should be very serious yet a search on keywords such s “felons vote Franken” return only the FoxNews link above and hundreds of conservative pundits talking about it. Ill-advised laws pushed through Congress via bureaucratic trickery may cause economic disaster but they can always be overturned or replaced by the next administration. But if elections don’t remain free then what guarantee is there that there will be a next administration?
