New Op-ed up at Fox News: Vote Counting in Minnesota

My new piece at Fox News can be found here. It starts this way:

Minnesota is becoming to 2008 politics what Florida was in 2000 or Washington State in 2004 – a real mess. The outcome will determine whether Democrats get 58 members of the U.S. Senate, giving them an effective filibuster proof vote on many issues.

When voters woke up on the Wednesday morning after the election, Senator Norm Coleman led Al Franken by what seemed like a relatively comfortable 725 votes. By Wednesday night, that lead had shrunk to 477. By Thursday night, it was down to 336. By Friday, it was 239. Late Sunday night, the difference had gone down to just 221 – a total change over 4 days of 504 votes.

Amazingly this all has occurred even though there hasn’t even yet been a recount. Just local election officials correcting claimed typos in how the numbers were reported. Counties will certify their results today and their final results will be sent to the Secretary of State by Friday. The actual recount won’t even start for over another week on November 19th.

Correcting these typos were claimed to add 435 votes to Franken and take 69 votes from Coleman. Corrections were posted in other races, but they were only a fraction of those for the Senate. The Senate gains for Franken were 2.5 times the change in the presidential race count, 2.9 times the total change across all Minnesota congressional races, and 5 times the change for all state House races. . . .

The piece has gotten widespread coverage on everything from Drudge to HotAir to Ann Coulter and many other websites. For two days now it has been the most read and emailed piece on Fox News.