Ballots can’t just be added to the count on a mere claim that they were lost or left in someone’s car. There has to be a chain of custody that alerts election officials to the fact that specific ballots are missing, shows where they can be found, and insures that any ballots recovered are, in fact, the same, unmodified ballots as were lost. Things like sealed ballot boxes, serial numbered ballots, stub counts, multiple logs, and witnesses from both parties at every step in the process provide this chain of custody.

This is why those of us that have election experience and work in information technology are so appalled by the bogus electronic voting systems that the fraudulently named Republican Party has foisted on a gullible political class. The whole point of these systems is to eliminate the layered, redundant protections that have secured the vote in this country for a century.

Anyone that is sincerely worried about fraud is looking at the machines and the corrupt electoral officials that champion them, not at impossible thefts of paper ballots or mobs of non-citizens packing the polls.

Personally, I doubt if Coleman has any chance for getting the GOP endorsement for Governor — though he might on the basis of an existing state wide organization and name recognition, manage to win a multi-candidate GOP primary. Should be interesting. I suspect we will have more than the current 13 candidates for the DFL endorsement than we currently have — some of whom will probably choose to contest a primary. It could be a most interesting political year. And given that the Teamsters seem postured to strike the Star-Tribune, and as a result probably put that failing Paper out of its current bankruptcy court misery, getting a good bead on what is happening may be difficult. I have my own theory as to why a gang of Texas Venture Capitalists bought Minnesota’s leading newspaper from McClatchy just in time to turn it into a no-news endorsee of Coleman last year — and how that plays into the Cornyn stance and now change of stance, and other mysterious going’s on — but we’ll save that for later.