The long-running battle for Minnesota’s Senate seat is finally over. Democracy – and Al Franken – won fair and square
In the end, the conspiracy theories became so laughable that the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee (RSCC) quietly removed its own “Minnesota Recount” website, once it became clear that no, the Democratic candidate Al Franken was not “stealing” the US Senate election in Minnesota, as the Republican party had been shamefully declaring, without actual evidence, for weeks following election day back on 4 November 2008.
Nearly eight months on from election day, Franken finally got to celebrate his election as Minnesota’s next US senator after the defeated Republican incumbent Norm Coleman dropped his quixotic legal challenge, and the state’s Republican governor announced he was going to formally approve Franken’s victory.
Although the victory was sealed today, the Republican claims of “voter fraud” became impossible to support long ago, because hand-marked paper ballots – nearly three million of them – as cast by the voters in the squeaker of an election, were actually being counted, in full view of the media and any interested citizen alike. To a ballot, they were all accounted for, and any disagreement about voter intent on those ballots was adjudicated in an open process by a bipartisan state canvassing board. All but a handful of those votes were determined unanimously by the board to have been cast either for Franken, for Coleman, for a third party candidate or for nobody at all.
The only question remaining after the weeks-long, painstaking, public hand-count was whether a number of uncounted absentee ballots, rejected as per the state’s strict standards for counting, should, in fact, be counted.
A tripartisan, three-judge panel took their time, in yet another fully public process, in reviewing evidence and hearing witness testimony presented by both sides. A few hundred more ballots were deemed to be legitimate and improperly rejected, and those too were then publicly counted – the counting again witnessed by all – and added to the final tally.
Hand-counted paper ballots proved, yet again, to be the gold standard in this election, which the state canvassing board, the three-judge election contest panel and now the state’s supreme court has affirmed as won by Franken, the former radio talkshow host and comedian, by a mere 312 votes.
Minnesota’s excellent election law, requiring both the secretary of state and the governor to sign the election certification only after all election contests are settled in the state, has assured that the next senator from Minnesota will not serve under a cloud of suspicion. Only the most insane and/or disingenuous could challenge the findings from one of the longest and most transparent election hand-counts in the history of the US.
Coleman, of course, may do exactly that. Though it’s exceedingly unlikely the US supreme court would rule in his favour – or even deem to review the case – Coleman still has the right to decide whether or not he’ll continue his fight, by taking it to the highest authority in the land.
If other states, and even the nation, had a law requiring that all ballots actually be counted, and all contests be fully settled before seating, we might have avoided the clouds of illegitimacy which always shrouded the Bush administration following the disputed election results in Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004, as well as countless other races – including Iran 2009.
When ballots are counted in secret (or, in many cases, not counted at all), democracy is dangerously imperilled. Lucky for Minnesotans, that wasn’t the case up there, even if it meant some eight months without proper representation in the US Congress. It was worth the wait.
Transparency was no match for the conspiracy theorists, including the RSCC, the head of the Republican party and even the Republican National Lawyers Association, who embarrassingly joined the black helicopter crowd in touting evidence-free claims of Franken’s “efforts to steal a seat in the United States Senate”.
Coleman, of course, was entitled to his contest, though it quickly became a desperate comedy of errors for the ousted Republican. His election contest began with a presentation of doctored evidence and concluded with the revelation of hidden legal notes and witnesses. The more he challenged the election and the counting of previously rejected absentee ballots, the wider Franken’s margin of victory grew.
The hard-fought post-election contest was understandable, of course. It’s a pity that Democrats don’t fight like hell for each and every vote they’re entitled to (yes, I’m speaking to you, John Kerry, and too many of your colleagues, or would-be colleagues.) Franken’s victory will now offer the Democrats a 60-vote, filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, following the recent party jump by former Pennsylvania Republican Arlen Specter.
Minnesota’s law is a good one, but as with any law, there is no guarantee it won’t be abused, as Coleman has done for so many months by filing specious challenges, flipping and flopping on ballots he first fought to keep from being counted, only to change his mind later in hopes of having them counted after all, once it appeared he was on the losing side of the democratic draw.
And what of those infamous claims of Democratic “voter fraud” by all of those Acorn voters? After the most detailed, ballot-by-ballot, voter-by-voter analysis of an election likely in the history of the country, surely the Republicans would be able to show at least one case of fraud committed by their favourite bogey-man community organising, voter-registration group, right? After all, Acorn managed to register more than 42,000 new voters in Minnesota in the last election cycle. With all the claims of voter fraud being committed by the group, surely this election, of all elections, would be where evidence of all that fraud would finally be revealed for all to see, no? Um, no. Apparently not.
Not a single allegation of Acorn-related voter fraud was presented by the Republicans throughout the entire eight-month contest, even in an election in which just a few hundred votes separated winner from loser. The closest anybody came to presenting evidence of such fraud was when Coleman’s own witness admitted that he hadn’t signed his ballot, and that it had been forged by his girlfriend. Coleman fought to have that ballot, and others that were also illegally submitted, accepted in the final tally. So much for the Democratic voter fraud canard. If nothing else, this election once again revealed the Republican claims of voter fraud to be amongst the biggest frauds in modern American elections. Transparency has a way of doing that.
Despite his concession speech this afternoon, Coleman could still try his luck at the US supreme court, and given the wild-card make-up of that body, anything could happen, I suppose. The law has little to do with it, it seems (see 2000′s Bush v Gore). But the story here is that democracy only works when every citizen is allowed to participate both in the casting and – as importantly – in the counting of the ballots.
When democracy is visible to all, it works. When it becomes buried behind secrecy, insider tabulations and computerised black boxes, the very basis of our system of government is put dangerously at stake.
Transparency wins again. Along with the voters of Minnesota. Nice to see the voters win one for a change. Now if Barack Obama puts his money where his mouth is and delivers some of the transparency to the American people that he once promised, we might stand a chance at rebuilding this country. That appears a difficult fight at this time. But the results, if we can get them, just as in Minnesota, will be worth every moment of that fight.
A military attack is unthinkable
Once cast as part of the ‘axis of evil’, Iranians have shown they are real people, not collateral damage in waiting
So Dick Cheney was right. In the end, the Iraqi people did respond to American soldiers with flowers. The only trouble was, it was their shipping out, not their digging in, that the Iraqi people celebrated. Today, as US forces marked their formal withdrawal from the towns and cities they invaded more than six years ago, the Iraqi people showed the kind of spontaneous joy the former vice-president once imagined would welcome the 173rd Airborne Brigade. There were streamers and balloons, pop concerts in the park and, yes, flowers – garlanding the abandoned checkpoints of the US military in petals.
Now, as Iraq recedes, it is the country next door that looms ever larger. Handled the wrong way, Iran threatens to define Barack Obama the way Iraq defined George W Bush.
There are some who believe Bush’s mistake was not to have shifted his aim eastward: that if he was looking for an oil-rich state in the Persian Gulf with links to terrorism and dreams of weapons of mass destruction then Iran, not Iraq, should have been his target. That kind of talk makes others nervous. They fear that the US might one day repeat the Iraq calamity, with the ayatollahs cast in the role of Saddam Hussein.
Those worriers will hardly find it comforting that the men who agitated for invasion in 2003 are back on the warpath once more: Paul Wolfowitz castigated Obama in the Washington Post earlier this month for taking “a neutral posture” towards the street protesters in Iran, calling on the president to throw all his prestige behind the uprising and against the regime. He wasn’t calling for regime change in Tehran, exactly, but Wolfowitz spoke about Iran’s rulers the same way he once spoke about Saddam.
Is that a sign of things to come? Put simply, have the events of the last three weeks in Tehran made the prospect of US-led action against Iran – up to and including the use of military force – more or less likely?
At first glance, those advocating regime change seem to have had a boost. The world has just watched a three-week infomercial exposing the brutality of Iran’s leaders. If it’s not allegations of a stolen election, including the black comedy of Monday’s announcement from the Guardian Council that, yes, there had been an error in the count and therefore Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s vote would be revised upward – it’s the violence that has followed.
One western diplomat says opinion in the chancelleries of Europe has hardened, even among those once well-disposed towards Tehran: “They have seen the face of this regime – and it’s not pretty.”
What’s more, those eager for confrontation might find an all too willing partner in Iran’s rulers. Professor Ali Ansari, a noted authority on the country, predicts that a regime that now “suffers from a serious domestic legitimacy problem – and which knows it – will seek a foreign foe, something to rally the country around.” He predicts “acts of provocation”, and only hopes Israel is wise enough not to take the bait.
Above all, those pushing for regime change could find international public opinion more receptive than it would have been a month ago. Three weeks of YouTube footage, including the blood-spattered image of Neda Soltan, the female protester shot dead in cold blood, has surely created a well of public sympathy from which any advocate of action against the mullahs could draw. One can imagine the arguments as, in 2011, President Obama, backed by his loyal ally Prime Minister Cameron of Britain, addresses the United Nations demanding a united show of strength to save the benighted people of Iran.
But the events of the last few weeks could point in the opposite direction too. Officially the US and UK say they want a change in policy, not regime – and, despite everything, that door is not closed. Indeed, it’s possible that the supreme leader’s Mugabe-like attacks on Britain – casting London and the BBC as the puppet masters behind the uprising – are a diversionary tactic by an elite that does not want to attack the US. Yes, Ali Khamenei has slammed Britain – but he has pointedly failed to rebuff Obama’s outstretched hand. In other words, a policy change by Iran is still possible.
But the deeper point relates to public sentiment, especially in the US. Seven years ago, Bush cast Iran as part of the “axis of evil”, a faraway, abstract place clothed in black and bent on destruction. Now the world’s people have read Iranians tweeting, minute by minute, on their aching desire for freedom. They have heard that Tehranis climb each night on to their rooftops to shout “God is great” – a subversive reminder to Khamenei that he is outranked by another supreme leader. They have seen, at last, that Iranians have a human face.
In this, an unexpected but eloquent source has been, of all things, Comedy Central’s satirical Daily Show. Incredibly, the programme had its own correspondent in Iran. Brilliantly sending up the grammar of flak-jacketed TV reporters, he has been ushering real Iranians into American living rooms – listening in mock frustration as they refuse to conform to the stereotype, telling him: “We don’t hate Jews, we don’t hate Americans, we don’t hate anybody.” Even the goatherd in a remote village shows a stunning knowledge of US geography; a market trader correctly identifies the US speaker of the House. As anchor Jon Stewart put it on the eve of the election: “The evil, despotic, apocalyptic death cult we know as Iran appears to be one of the more vibrant democracies in the Middle East.”
Of course, educated folk will insist they have long been familiar with Iran’s human face. They will point to art exhibitions such as Made in Iran, now in London, or Iran Inside Out in New York, movies including the new Shirin and the much-admired Persepolis, or memoirs such as Reading Lolita in Tehran. What’s different about the last few weeks, however, is that this exposure to the complexity, variety and sheer humanness of Iran’s people has become mainstream.
This could cut both ways. Some Europeans and Americans might feel such empathy for the green revolutionaries that they join the neocon call and demand their governments act to rescue the Iranians from tyranny. But it’s more likely that many would recoil from a shock and awe bombardment that would kill thousands of the very people for whom they now have a strong affinity. There was, alas, too little feeling for the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan: they were always faceless, even in death.
All of which leaves Obama engaged in delicate diplomatic footwork. He must stand up for democracy, condemning the suppression in Iran as “outrageous”, even as he gives the ayatollahs no excuse to crack down on the protesters as foreign agents, and all the while ensuring the western offer to Iran of rapprochement in return for compromise remains on the table. It is subtle work. But now that the world’s people have seen the human face of Iran, nothing less will do. The street protesters of Tehran may have failed to topple their rulers. But in this – in showing the world that the people of Iran are human beings, not collateral damage in waiting – they have been a glorious success.