Minnesota Is No Florida

On the surface, the never-ending Minnesota Senate contest between Democrat Al Franken and Republican Norm Coleman looks like a case study in how not to run an election.

There have been ballots lost, ballots allegedly counted twice, absentee ballots rejected improperly and then tossed back into the recount. A state canvassing board appears poised to name Franken the winner by a narrow margin, but that won't end the story. Coleman has promised to go to court, and under Minnesota law the state can't certify a winner if the election is still legally contested.

That means the Senate will open for business this week with not one but two disputed seats. The other, of course, is the one vacated by President-elect Barack Obama, and that indicted Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich has appointed former state Attorney General Roland Burris to fill. Democratic leaders have pledged not to seat anyone tapped by the radioactive Blagojevich, who faces federal corruption charges, but their legal options remain unclear.

While the Burris controversy has dominated news coverage, the dispute over Minnesota's still-vacant Senate seat could turn out to be more disruptive. Coleman and his GOP allies have complained bitterly over alleged irregularities, comparing the Minnesota recount to the controversial 2004 gubernatorial recount in Washington state that installed Democrat Christine Gregoire based on a margin of 129 votes.

Should Senate Democrats intervene and install Franken provisionally, as some have suggested, it could get the session off to an acrimonious start. A Coleman challenge could even work its way to the Supreme Court, reviving disputes over whether the high court's landmark Bush v. Gore ruling, which installed President Bush in 2000, should set legal precedent.

For all that, the Minnesota recount is hardly a voting rights fiasco. While Republicans are fomenting talk of a stolen election, the process in Minnesota thus far has been transparent, orderly and far less chaotic than it might have been. Indeed, Minnesota statutes that clearly spell out recount rules every step of the way have spared the state many a headache.

Minnesota law, for example, automatically triggers a recount when the margin between two candidates is less than one-half of 1 percent. That meant that when Coleman led Franken by 215 votes out of 2.9 million on Election Day, there was no question how the state should proceed. Election officials wondering how to interpret ambiguous ballots also could rely on Minnesota statute, which spells out guidelines for determining voters' intent, complete with more than a dozen hypothetical examples such as how to handle an "X" that's out of place.

Another godsend for Minnesota has been its paper ballot requirement, which made the hand recount possible to begin with, said Secretary of State Mark Ritchie (D). "You cannot recount computerized touch-screen voting," he noted.

The state constitution, moreover, provides for the automatic establishment of a five-member canvassing board when an election's outcome is questioned. Ritchie sits on the politically mixed board and appointed the four other members. The canvassing board represents the Democratic-Farm-Labor party -- Minnesota's arm of the national Democratic Party -- as well as the GOP and the Independence Party; that hasn't ended charges of partisanship, but it makes them less plausible.

Ritchie acknowledges that the hand recount, the largest in the state's history, has pointed up ways Minnesota can improve its election process. The most troubling glitches have been the disappearance of 133 ballots in the city of Minneapolis; the Coleman camp's allegations that 100 or more ballots were double-counted; and disputes over absentee ballots. As many as 1,600 absentee ballots were improperly rejected, and were ultimately reopened.

"I've been most surprised by the wrongly rejected absentee ballots," said Kathryn Pearson, a political science professor at the University of Minnesota. Nationally, experts say, absentee ballots in the 2008 election were rejected at a much higher rate than ballots cast via in-person early voting. Absentee voting doubled in Minnesota between 2006 and 2008, said Ritchie, who added: "Our internal systems were not able to handle that increase in some instances."

Still, Pearson and others give Minnesota high marks for its deliberate, transparent recount process. The state even released streaming video of the canvassing board at work, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune printed copies of actual questioned ballots so that readers could draw their own conclusions.

"Minnesota is known for clean elections and competent election management," said Pearson. "And despite these ups and downs, and despite the drama of this recount, I actually think that most Minnesotans would argue that the process has been transparent, well managed by the secretary of state's office, and well explained."

Bill Flanigan, a political science professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota, gave some of the credit to Minnesota's exhaustive recount rules. "I really doubt if most states have a recount law as explicit as ours," he said. "And I think the procedures have worked well. So I think other states might consider copying the law."

Time will tell whether Minnesota's reputation for election integrity survives this grueling and politically charged recount. Any election this close inevitably exposes the voting system's weakest points. Minnesota, at least, appears to be making the best of a bad situation.