Democrats win Minnesota state House special election, setting up shared control of the chamber
An existing power-sharing agreement reached last month will keep a Republican speaker in power in the state House.
Fuck republicans, but also, what in the absolute fuck is this?
Another part of the deal was that House Republicans said they wouldn’t take action to remove Democratic Rep. Brad Tabke, whose narrow 14-vote win in November was called into question when election officials discovered they’d accidentally thrown out 21 absentee ballots without counting them.
Even if all 21 ballots ended up being votes for the challenger, they should and need to be counted.
Devils advocate: elections are always going to be imperfect ways of polling the masses. They're so big, with so many moving parts, supported and organized by humans: mistakes will be made. I'll go so far as to say that crimes will be committed, electioneering and voter fraud. These inherent features must be weighed against the ultimate goal of the election, which is to decide a winner with finality. Rarely is it going to be that close of a race where the quantity of mistakes and misdeeds are going to make a difference, but if it might there are avenues to take a case through the courts where the law and the interests at play will be weighed.
One of the interests weighed here, maybe even by the lawyers that might decide whether to bring a case, will certainly be the fact that the 21 ballots were not misplaced and later found, but thrown out with the trash. I don't know enough about it to know whether the 21 voters could be identified and asked to recast their votes, but I would think not.
In my jurisdiction, such a close race triggers an automatic hand recount. That's the due process. If 21 ballots are missed in both the first count and the recount, that's still a valid election.
I have this understanding of it sort of like, when the counters finish counting, for better or worse, "you get what you get and you don't get upset." Going in, you have to know that it's an imperfect process run by humans, and you have to know that 21 ballots might get thrown out. So as a candidate, if you could talk to every voter and get a certain promise that they would for sure vote one way or another, and you knew you had enough promises to win by exactly 21, you'd still continue to campaign because you know you don't just need one more than the other candidate to win, but as many more as possible to ensure that you to win the count. And on non election days, you work to improve the process, to train new people to help run the election, to lobby for better election laws.
Ultimately, leaving an election undecided, uncertified, in my opinion, is more damaging to the electrical process and to democracy than occasionally, in the most narrow of margins, maybe, very rarely, getting it wrong. My two cents on it.