Get ready to watch Bill O'Reilly's head explode: Math shows Franken win to be a near certainty

After spending several hours on theStar Tribune website examining 1,333 challenged ballots (20% of the total challenges) in the Minnesota Senate race, I am now fully confident that Al Franken will be our next Senator from Minnesota. I will eat crow if I am wrong on this one, but the math is on my side here and unless there is a huge statistical anomaly that favors Coleman then Franken has this contest in the bag even if those missing ballots from Minneapolis never get counted.

I examined those 1,333 challenges with consistent standards for both candidates, and I have a very good understanding of Minnesota election law so I am confident that the judges on the canvassing board will agree with the vast majority of decisions I made. Most of the decisions were very easy to make as the intent was clear on the vast majority of ballots, and there is no question of how the judges will rule on 90% of them.

After examining 20% of the challenged ballots Al Franken showed a 105 vote net gain. If this trend continues as it has since basically the time I started counting then in the end Franken will have made a net gain of 525 votes after all the challenged ballots are examined giving Franken a 333 vote victory. The margin of error on this statistic is 143 votes, meaning that Franken's lead is more than double that margin of error.

Now some may question where these ballots I looked at are coming from. After paying attention to the down ticket races on the many ballots I inspected it is clear that the ballots were coming from all corners of the state, both urban and rural, both Democratic and Republican precincts. It seems to be a very representative sample, and considering that Franken was showing 15% to 20% more votes throughout nearly the entire course of my analysis it seems highly likely that trend will continue when the other 80% of the votes are examined.

While both candidates had some frivolous challenges, it became clear very quickly that Coleman had far more frivolous challenges than Franken did and as a result he will likely lose by a wide enough margin that it would be extremely difficult for him to mount a legal challenge to the results.

If you think this is just me coming up with these numbers then look at the ballots on the Star Tribune website and you will see that the Star Tribune's results for everyone who took their ballot challenge shows Franken with a 256 vote lead and an 88 vote margin of error. As I generally don't trust online stats such as these because they are so easy for partisans to manipulate, after seeing results similar to that when I did my own analysis I realized that number appears to be at least fairly close to being accurate. If you analyze enough ballots I am sure you will begin to see similar results as well, so if you don't trust my numbers vote on some ballots and see what you come up with. I promise that by the time you look at several hundred of them you will see that things are looking very good for Franken.

Get ready to celebrate at the end of the month, because I am confident that when the canvassing board announces the results Al Franken will be our next Senator and Bill O'Reilly will be rushed to the hospital after his head suddenly explodes.

I looked at some ballots when they were first posted, and it was an interesting exercise...still can't get over the person who voted for Obama, Franken & Michelle Bachmann, but I digress.

Instead of taking O'Reilly to a hospital, how about an institution? He can bring his Peabody award with him...um, I mean his Polk (it's just as good! really!).

:silly:

Billo's head explodes live on TEEVEE. 29.95 call your cable providers.

But alas, I turned in my digital cable box, which lowered my bill $17 per month. No PPV or on-demand (or CSPAN2, the bastards!) for me without subscribing to the "digital tier."

so you no longer need cable/satellite to watch them.

Tesha

Hospitalization would be, err . . . heading in the wrong direction?

excellent news! :)

but beware of the "lies and the lying liars who tell them"

I get close and they add more

And I have Franken ahead by 42, which according to the website projects out to Franken winning by 141 plus or minus 178.

The more votes I counted the better things started to look, soon you will start seeing a lead that is larger than the margin of error.

I have Franken leading by 112. The second group of ballots seem to favor Franken.The "everyone" catagory has Franken up by 256.

That makes me a little more nervous, but I assume that Franken has been in the lead for a long time at least?

If Franken voters would have asked for a new ballot instead of crossing out Coleman and selecting Franken, Franken would have easily won.

If a person crosses out Coleman and votes Franken or vice-versa then the vote will be counted. Minnesota law is very clear on that situation, if the intent is clear then the vote counts even if the voter filled out the ballot incorrectly.

Subd. 3.Votes for too many candidates.If a voter places a mark (X) beside the names of more candidates for an office than are to be elected or nominated, the ballot is defective with respect only to that office. No vote shall be counted for any candidate for that office, but the rest of the ballot shall be counted if possible. At a primary, if a voter has not indicated a party preference and places a mark (X) beside the names of candidates of more than one party on the partisan ballot, the ballot is totally defective and no votes on it shall be counted. If a voter has indicated a party preference at a primary, only votes cast for candidates of that party shall be counted.

https://www.revisor.leg.state.mn.us/statutes/?id=204C.22

Read that passage again and you will see it only refers to cases in which more than one candidate has marks next to their name, it does not say anything about either of the votes being crossed out. If one of the votes is crossed out then according to the Secretary of State's rules "if marks were made next to two candidates and an attempt to erase one of the two, vote is counted for the remaining marked candidate."

You can read all the rules on determining voter intent here: http://www.sos.state.mn.us/docs/voterintentmaterials.pdf

Franken will win by 100's of votes

Do you all think this is a go for Al? This race is driving me crazy

I think it will, but it will be close

As I am going through the ballots on the STrib website and a lot of the challenges on ballots (from both sides) are people writing people in for other races downticket being challenged as IDing the voter or as a distinguishing mark.

Does MN have either case law or precedent that would make these ballots clearly acceptable? I know here in CT you cannot challenge a write-in vote unless it fails another criterion. (Making it an over-vote or an inadmissible ballot.)

Otherwise, this could be wide open as these make up something like 50% of the (admittedly small sample of) 20 ballots I've reviewed thus far...but the vast majority of the Coleman challenges (as in all of them except two where intent for Franken was clear but Coleman was asserting they were overvotes with no clear intent.)

The ballots with write-ins that are being thrown out as "distinguishing marks" are frivolous challenges, people are allowed to vote for whoever they want to. If you want to vote for yourself as President you have every right to do that, and they can't throw out a person's senate vote because of who they voted for in a different race. Unless someone writes down "My name is John Doe" or something which is very clearly identifying the judges aren't going to throw out a ballot based on an identifying mark. Most of the challenges are frivolous so if it looks like a valid vote it almost certainly is.

but I was curious as to local precedent...I guess having seen it so often, I'm just wary of the absurd ways the GOP finds to steal elections on lame parlor tricks.

The most successful challenges will be the ones in which the intent of the voter is clear but the ballot was filled out incorrectly. Challenging an opponents vote rarely works, as the precedent has always been for judges to count ballots when intent can be determined and if the ballot was initially read for a candidate it is most likely actually for them.

Why are identifying marks bad, anyway. I mean, Sure we have a secret ballot. But as a voter, I would have thought that was a right, not a responsibility. If I want to sign my name to my ballot, post a picture of my ballot on the internet, or Buy an hour of public access TV and rant about who I voted for, isn't that also my right, so long as its my choice not someone else forcing me to do it?

if there is a corrupt election judge, they can review signatures to be sure that people voted the way they said they would.

and Franken was 3rd on the ballot for Senator. It looks like a lot of people put a penmark or started to fill out the 2nd slot which is Coleman and realized they made a mistake. At least that is my take on it.

Election officials I've talked to say that's actually very common, and the completely filled in oval would be counted; it would not be an overvote. The intent would be doubly clear when one sees that the voter filled in other ovals completely and properly.

BTW, the candidate order on MN ballots is "chosen" at random (with the write-in option being last).

If Franken is truly a lock a hansom profit stands to be made.

For the good of the state of Minnesota.

and think I was very conservative, and have Franken by 17

As you vote on more ballots you will see that number increase.

Coleman in the lead. I wonder if the new ballots made the difference or if the site had been freeped.

to have voted for Coleman, and how vulnerable Franken will be in 6 years.

How many votes went to Barkley -- wasn't it about 250k or something? Now THAT'S the Ross Perot effect in action. If only a few hundred of those went to Franken instead...

times to his campaign. Coleman should never have been elected in the first place, we all know.

It's like water to a thirsty man. My heart is pounding as I make my way down the comments. It can be so.

Somehow I think we are going to get hosed on that one and they are going to claim they never exsisted. It seems very fishy to me.

There was an attempt to deny their existance at first, but after the discrepencies in their story were pointed out they admitted that yes they had lost the votes. We know exactly how many votes were on those ballots in the initial count however, and if those are counted in it will give Franken 46 net votes on top of the numbers I posted in my OP. My guess is those votes will be counted as the judges on the canvassing board are not going to want to disenfranchise people based on a clerical error, but even if those votes are not counted I would still predict a Franken win based off the challenged ballots.

Thanks for posting.

but on the other hand, I am sure Keith will replay it many times.

And if you haven't seen it yet, be careful... NSFW!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5j2YDq6FkVE

:rofl: Thanks for sharing.

Big deal, it'd just be like a balloon popping, a sudden rush of air, and a noise. That head's as empty as Cheney's soul.

obviously. We just can't tell the difference.

Should once a week introduce a resolution cracking a joke on Bill O'Reilly.

LOL.

A short one liner with logic and his comic talent.

Ok just joking, and would not be appropriate... but it would be funny. LOL

And it's also great to know that this is all laid out clearly for the public to see -- so that if Coleman somehow is declared the winner, somebody is going to have a lot of explaining to do.

i really like franken a lot.

Maybe the math shows it, but unfortunately this will come down to politics, intimidation, and perhaps under the table deals. Who ever wins can expect lawsuits and political partisan calls for investigations. I'm skeptical, because Democrats lay down to much in the face of Republican pressure, as in the Democratic congress laying down for Bush for 8 years.

The United States is a LIBERAL Country.

:dem:

-Laelth

The Star Trib website is predicting that my projected vote totals would have Franken winning by 471 votes with a margin of error of +- 220

I voted 346 for Franken
279 for Coleman
and 48 for other, or no one

I found it really easy to determine the voter's intent most of the time. I think the canvassing board will have very few that require more than a few seconds of their consideration.

Disclaimer: I am a Franken supporter,

but I really did think it was easy to see the voter intent.

I show him winning by 315 votes now with a 127 vote margin of error, these numbers have been holding fairly steady for quite a while which makes me all the more confident that they will hold throughout the process.

At first I thought it was just a scribble, instead of filling in the circle completely like you're supposed to do. Then I realized that the curlicue scribble was exactly the same for every vote. Looking more closely, I saw that the voter had written the word "yes" in very tiny cursive script in each of the circles for her choices.

I visualize this voter as a senior woman.

......it'll probably look like a scene out of Resident Evil when it does. And Keith Olbermann will play it over and over and over for weeks. And we'll all be happy to see it. :D

That is such a clever thing they have there. I hope the trend stays the same.

He'll be the only Senator I'll have ever shaken hands with. My cousin still has his book from a couple years ago that he signed during his Air America tours in Madison WI.

It would be a sort of choking sound, followed by a heavy thud.

for these votes and why it would be different for each camp - I don't get it. :shrug:

The Coleman campaign had a strategy at the beginning to make sure they consistently stayed in the lead by frivolously challenging Franken ballots so that the votes would not be counted for him until the canvassing board meets. Franken didn't want to look like he was falling too far behind so his campaign made some frivolous challenges as well.

There are other types of challenges too however, sometimes a campaign will challenge an undervote if they think there is a chance they can get the ballot counted for them. In other words when you only look at the number of challenged ballots by each campaign it doesn't mean too much because there are some challenges of the opponents ballots which will take a vote away from that opponent, and some challenges of undervotes or overvotes which will not subtract a vote from the opponents total. This makes it hard for anyone to know exactly how the challenged ballots will split unless they do what I did and take several hours to examine them.

It is usually very easy to determine how the judges will rule on these ballots. If the vote is clearly for one candidate the vote will almost certainly be counted for that candidate as most challenges are not successful. The judges do take voter intent into account even if the the voter filled out their ballot incorrectly. If they circled the name of the candidate rather than filled in the bubble that is still a valid vote. One thing that can result in a ballot being thrown out is if the voter writes a name on there or makes any other sort of identifying mark. There are many challenges on the basis of identifying marks, most of those challenges will be rejected by the judges and the votes will be counted however as when in doubt the judges are going to lean towards ruling that something is not an identifying mark as they don't like throwing out ballots on technicalities especially when the mark in question may not actually be identifying. Essentially you can figure out who the judges are going to rule for in the vast majority of cases through common sense. There were a very small number of ballots that were really filled out strangely and I don't know how the judges will rule on those ones, but the vast majority of them are obvious.

I had no idea this kind of stuff went on.

It was reported that Coleman challenged votes where the voter had clearly voted for McCain and for Franken on the grounds that anyone who voted for McCain must have intended to vote for Coleman.

(Could a helpful DU reader supply me with a punchline by linking to the "lizard people" ballot?)

Go Al

BillO's head exploding, a la Scanners



:D

but really, wouldn't it have been a lot easier and more clear if they had simply had a runoff election?

I only wish I was kidding.

"FOX News TV host Bill O'Reilly describes himself "as the most controversial journalist and commentator in the United States of America." In his memoir, A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity, he explains how he got that way.

O'Reilly says the book's title comes straight from his childhood, when a nun used the phrase to describe him as she punished him for misbehaving in her third-grade class.

"Some people thought Jesus was evil; they nailed him to a cross," O'Reilly said.

That led to a question: Was he now comparing himself to Jesus Christ?

"No, but I'm giving you an analogy that's vivid," O'Reilly answered."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98060534

had to say it

;-)

if Jesus really was evil.

or maybe had a few mental problems, at the very least.


The reason I wonder is because of what he says in John 14:5....

"I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me..."

Wow. It takes a pretty big ego to say something like that. The fact that he said it nearly 2000 years ago only adds to the disturbance factor for me because all we have is second hand accounts from people who believed whatever he had to say.

Much like....Bush supporters. It would be interesting to travel a hundred or five hundred years into the future to see what History has to say about George W Bush. I would imagine his hateful legacy would be much watered-down by then, and he might even be seen as being the "liberator" he thinks he is. Only we, who had lived through his disaster, would know the reality.


So anyway, back to Jesus...someone claiming he is the only one who can confer something that huge (a way to God) upon believers....I dunno...to me it's highly suspicious.

And here we have Billow Reilly trying to share the crucifix spotlight with one of the most famous men in History.

Anyway, I know that I'm probably opening myself up to some pretty vicious bashing from the Jesus lovers out there, but hey...it's only my own opinion, after all, and not likely to change Religion in any way.

:)

Since that was written hundreds of years after the real Jesus by some anonymous writer, you can stop worrying.

Hebrew-Greek, Greek-Greek, Greek to Middle-English, Middle English-English, and so on.

Not to mention the editing and expurgating of the gospels at Nicea, where the Paulines won the 'worship over follow' fight within the church, with the help of the Roman Empire. Yep. The same empire that iced their savior became the Church's partner a few short centuries later.

Especially since Jesus would have spoken Aramaic.

I left that out, along with Greek-English, Aramaic-English, Hebrew-English,various Koines,etc. (The Old Testament figures into these arguments, too.) The point remains that, not only was this oral history that wasn't documented until centuries after the events occurred, but humans had many opportunities to muck it up further as time went on.

Why does the Franken campaign claim they lead by 4 votes? If your analysis is correct, wouldn't they be claiming a higher margin?

People are already questioning Franken's claim of a lead and I think they know if they were to claim a much higher lead people would be questioning them even more. Don't get me wrong I am sure that the Franken campaign had a methodology for coming up with that number, but it is just an estimate based off that methodology they are using. Their number is not perfect, and my number is not perfect either. Until the canvassing board meets there will be no perfect number, but all the evidence points to a Franken lead.

after 306 ballots, I've got it at Coleman: 127, Franken: 153, other: 26, which extrapolates to Franken up by 373, but with a +/- of 333. Who fucking knows....

But if you look at those numbers you will see that even in your early analysis Franken's lead is outside the margin of error. As you check more ballots you will see the margin of error get smaller and Franken's lead remain fairly steady between a 275 and 375 vote lead.

unfortunately, with Coleman even projected ahead by a few dozen votes. Just too damn close.... makes me feel icky. However, I do thank you for introducing me to my new favourite online game.

With three million votes, how can a race be this CLOSE!!!

The only other race this close was the 2000 Presidential election
where Bush won by 1 vote (Scalia's).
That reminds me, impeach Scalia and Thomas.

I can't stand it! WIN THIS THING AL!!!!!
Damn.

I've never really seen challenged ballots before and I'm amazed at the pettiness as to why votes are allowed to be challenged. The OVERWHELMING number of ballots are more than obvious as to voter intent and should NEVER have been challenged at all. It's like each side looked for every slightest little fucking reason to try and disqualify the ballot and I say shame on both sides for their bullshit. I say that both to franken and coleman. Just because the coleman camp was being so petty doesn't mean the franken camp had to match them. Just look at those ballots. Would ANYONE argue against the intent of almost all of them? Soooooo obvious. What a monumental waste of time for Minnesota to now have to go through these one by one. I find the challenges disgusting; cause each one means someone tried to steal the right to vote from somebody just for sake of victory, even though the voters intent was beyond clear. Politicians can be such scumbags.

Having that said, I still am crossing my fingers that Franken will pull this out. Your OP is very encouraging!

Yes, both campaigns should be ashamed by the challenges they have made. I think both campaigns do know one thing however, the judges on the canvassing board are not going to accept their frivolous challenges. I don't think the reason they are making these challenges is to attempt to overturn the will of the voters, they know that will not work because the judges are not so petty to allow them to get by with that crap. I think the real reason they are making the challenges is to make it appear that they are doing well in the recount. When a challenge is made that is a vote that won't be counted for a couple of weeks, so by challenging votes the candidates are able to make their own totals look better. I think the Coleman campaigns strategy was to make sure they remained in the lead throughout the hand recount process so they would challenge as many ballots as it took to do that. The Franken campaign didn't want it to look like they were falling too far behind however so they also made all kinds of frivolous challenges so that it did not appear that Coleman was pulling ahead by a large margin. Both campaigns have basically admitted to this, and some of these challenges have now been withdrawn. I would expect hundreds more to be withdrawn before the canvassing board meets next week as well, the judges are not going to be happy if they have to waste their time discussing ballots in which the intent is clear and neither campaign has any incentive in pissing the judges off.

!

They will continue meeting until they get it done. SOS Ritchie has said he hoped they could finish up the 19th but at the very least before Christmas. It really depends how many challenges remain, and what sort of methodology they use if any for sorting into categories for review.

I was surprised that night it was so close.

Go Al!

But I come up different than others, apparently. It hurts me every time I click Coleman, But if I answer them in a way honest to my own conscience, I have Coleman leading the challenges 50% to 45%. I am hoping this changes as I do more, But I Don't have much hope. Other than the hope that 57.5 senate seats will be enough.

first several hundred.

I had Coleman ahead by 600. At 300, it was down to about 200, and at 400, I had coleman by 44. we will see It does seem to be balancing some, but so far its been consistantly in Colemans favor after the first 10

by a projected 207 vote margin (Franken 264 - Coleman 232 - Other 38) if carried through to the remainder of the ballots. I would say that 9 out of every 10 are very obvious, it's hard to determine what the grounds were for showing the voter's intent.

I just hope that this goes to the court and they are as non-partisan as I tried to be. If that happens, it looks like Mr. Al Franken will be going to Washington!