Hope For Coleman: Minnesota Senate Recount May Have Been Unconstitutional

Under precedent put into place by (surprise!) Bush vs. Gore:

You would think people would learn. The recount in the contest between Norm Coleman and Al Franken for a seat in the U.S. Senate isn’t just embarrassing. It is unconstitutional.
This is Florida 2000 all over again, but with colder weather. Like that fiasco, Minnesota’s muck of a process violates the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. Indeed, the controlling Supreme Court decision is none other than Bush v. Gore. …
Minnesota is Bush v. Gore reloaded. The details differ, but not in terms of arbitrariness, lack of uniform standards, inconsistency in how local recounts were conducted and counted, and strange state court decisions.
Consider the inconsistencies: One county “found” 100 new votes for Mr. Franken, due to an asserted clerical error. Decision? Add them. Ramsey County (St. Paul) ended up with 177 more votes than were recorded election day. Decision? Count them. Hennepin County (Minneapolis, where I voted — once, to my knowledge) came up with 133 fewer votes than were recorded by the machines. Decision? Go with the machines’ tally. All told, the recount in 25 precincts ended up producing more votes than voters who signed in that day.
Then there’s Minnesota’s (first, so far) state Supreme Court decision, Coleman v. Ritchie, decided by a vote of 3-2 on Dec. 18. (Two justices recused themselves because they were members of the state canvassing board.) While not as bad as Florida’s interventions, the Minnesota Supreme Court ordered local boards to count some previously excluded absentee ballots but not others. Astonishingly, the court left the decision as to which votes to count to the two competing campaigns and forbade local election officials to correct errors on their own.

I’m not sure that Norm Coleman back in the Senate is particularly helpful for the conservative cause of bringing the Republican party back to its limited government roots and thus back into the majority in Congress, but certainly he’s an improvement over Franken. And ultimately justice in this case is a cause that trumps any partisan concerns.
The election was close, no doubt, but it appears as though Franken was declared the winner not because he got the most votes but because he was better than Coleman at manipulating the vote counting. Which is no way to win an election.
What Minnesota needs is a do-over election, because this one was clearly botched by election officials (and court officials) in Minnesota. But that solution would likely need to start with the Minnesota state legislature. Given that it’s currently controlled by Democrats, I doubt such a solution is coming.
One can only hope that eventually Minnesota voters will punish Democrats for stealing this election by booting their candidate, Franken, from office in the next election. Unfortunately, well have to put up with six years of Senator Smalley before that can happen.