Al Franken, Norm Coleman and the Beautiful Internet

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Occasionally I go to theuptake.org, the Minnesota community news organization that has streamed all the public moments in courtroom and hearing room, including the news conferences outside those rooms sparked by what went on inside those rooms, that have gone on during the long months of the Minnesota senate recount. A live blog is also going on simultaneously, so you can watch the events and see the words of those commenting on the events.

More often than not, a few minutes hanging around the site get me more recent and more accurate information than I get from the Minneapolis newspapers and TV stations, which the search engines point to.

For instance, those who follow the recount closely know that the three-judge panel appointed by Minnesota Supreme Court justice Carl Eller has already narrowed the universe of absentee ballots that *might* be counted to something just under 5,000, and that yesterday the court divided those disputed ballots into 19 categories and asked the two campaigns to present arguments on whether or not each of those categories should be accepted. They were not talking about individual ballots but about groups of ballots, and the intent certainly seemed to be that they did not want to check out ballots out one at a time but to accept or reject them in groups -- assuming that the ballots were correctly categorized in the first place.

But I don't know if that's in dispute. There's a point at which even one's desire to have the timeliest of news flags. In this case that timeliness, of course, does not mean that I can change the outcome but only that I will not be surprised by the outcome. (Isn't that the motive for so much of our hunger for the up-to-the minute account, the live feed, the flash poll?)

Anyway, I naturally wonder what those 19 ballot categories are, and how many of the ballots potentially in play fall into each category. Skimming the liveblog, I discover that someone has produced that very information set.

Here that marvelous data is.

A Ballots Excluded, Even Though Not Marked "Rejected" By Local Election Officials 321 97 224 . B Ballots Rejected For No Apparent Or Given Reason 163 26 137 . C1 STICKERS: Ballots Rejected Due to Error of Government Clerk or Local Election Official 857 0 857 . C2 WRONG BALLOT SENT: Ballots Rejected Due to Error of Government Clerk or Local Election Official 18 1 17 . D1 Ballots rejected because no application for absentee ballot could be found. 199 69 130 . D2 Ballots rejected for no voter signature on envelope, even though voter signed the envelope 80 3 77 . D3 Ballots rejected for signature mismatch, even though the signatures were from the same voter 830 27 803 . D4 Ballots rejected for no witness address even though the address was easily available 42 1 41 . D5 Ballots rejected for lack of complete witness address 131 14 117 . D6 Ballots rejected for lack of proof of residence even though witness indicated voter provided such proof. 213 10 203 . D7 Ballots rejected for lack of registration, even though they were sent "Registered Voter " envelope and was actually registered. 637 133 504 . D8 Ballots rejected for lack of registration, where voter was sent "Non-Registered Voter " envelope and was actually registered. 1280 76 1204 . D9 Ballots rejected for lack of proper witness, even though witness was a registered MN voter. 318 8 310 . D10 Ballots rejected for being late, even though there is not clear evidence ballot was late. 174 2 172 . D11 Absentee ballots from military members received late. 36 0 36 . 5299 467 4832 . . The three columns are original number of ballots in each category, those counted earlier by agreement of the two camps and those still uncounted. . .

. . .

Hey, there are only 15 categories. Still, the point remains: Man cannot live by Google alone, nor Yahoo, either.

Let Us Now Praise Useful Websites

One of my liberal blogs pointed me toward TheUptake.org for the latest and best Minnesota senate recount news. Indeed, if the word "news" suggests something mediated, TheUptake is a little more than that. The site has been streaming live video of the Minnesota canvassing board as it has moved through the recount of the tightly contested content between Al Franken and Norm Coleman. I suppose you could say the website presented the actual event, from which viewers could conclude what The News was.

No, it did more than that. Lack of mediation or interpretation can be confounding, though give me the event first and the interpretation second. Over the last weeks, TheUptake's citizen journalists kept a running count of the changing vote -- plus live blogging and live commentary -- as the board allotted the ballots that had been challenged or ignored because of eccentric or incomplete bubble filling. Today it kept a running total as the 900+ ballots wrongly rejected absentee ballots were counted.

Were there more than 900 wrongly rejected ballots? Yeah, but last week the Minnesota Supreme Court in a quasi-Solomonic decision had given both campaigns veto rights concerning the acceptability of the 1,350 that a previous process had concluded were wrongly rejected.

Meanwhile looming -- or so Coleman hopes -- are some allegedly lost votes, some allegedly double counted votes, an addtional 600+ absentee votes the Coleman campaign cherry-picked from precincts he won and tried to throw on the table in recent days. (This recount is a Russian nesting doll.)

Anyway, anyone who watched TheUpTake stream TODAY saw Al Franken get a 175 vote boost as the count went down. Afterwards, one could watch the somewhat self-satisfied statement of the Minnesota Secretary of State very satisfied and very unsatisfied statements (respectively) by the lawyers for the Franken and Coleman campaigns. You could see and hear it all.

The technical quality of it all was just a little shakey, which made it seem just that much more authentic as black and white photos seem more authentic to persons of a certain age.

TheUptake.org invites viewers to contact the organization to find out how they can create their own net site for community news. I've known for a long time this was something you could do, but the coverage of the recount helped me understand why you would want to do it.

The site has a link to California-San Francisco news, though I don't see anything going on. I'll keep an eye on it.