Coleman, please stop misleading voters

Grade school politics don't seem to go away after the votes are in. What is Sen. Norm Coleman trying to prove? And if in fact he does win reelection once the final tally comes out, he should probably just go about his business quietly. You won reelection with less than 500 votes as an incumbent? And you were running against a former comedian? Yikes.

Go check out Coleman's campaign site to see how he feels. He's making his own rules and declaring victory before Minnesota can make the votes final. Franken's site features the press release he sent out yesterday reassuring voters that every ballot will be counted.

Here is the screenshot in case it disappears. We wouldn't put it past him to realize the site is not making voters happy, so he has a change of heart and takes it down.

And he is definitely confusing the country. Search around on Google and you'll find plenty of confused folks celebrating his win.

Senate Guru did some number crunching and showed how easily Franken could gain the lead:

There are 4,132 precincts across Minnesota. That means that Franken needs only to pick up one single vote every 8.6 precincts in order to claim the lead. Every 8 or 9 precincts, there just has to be one single ballot overlooked, one single ballot that didn't scan right.

MinnPost also pointed out that 2 out of every 1,000 optically scanned votes aren't counted. That means an extra 6,000 votes could enter the total.

The Star Tribune caught Franken's interview on Minnesota Public Radio today where he restated the need for the recount to go forward, which is an automatic process in a close election:

"It's very premature to prejudge the outcome of this, considering that we're already seeing that once you start canvassing, you already see a lot of things," Franken, the DFL challenger to Republican Sen. Norm Coleman, told MPR's Gary Eichten in a live interview moments ago.

Recounts can change the outcome of elections, Franken said, noting that such a thing happened in the recent race for St. Louis County Attorney. In response to Coleman's call on him to concede, Franken said: "Candidates don't get to decide when the election's over or who won. The voters do."