Ever since the contested 2000 election contest was decided in a political and legal circus culminating in the Bush v Gore Supreme Court decision, claims of election fraud have formed a key foundation of political debate on the ideological left. Alas, it appears that fiction may have become reality in Minnesota. Only this time, the villains are not nefarious Republican computer hackers sabotaging Diebold voting machine software, but rather more traditional corruption among state and local electioneering officials. Powerline reports on some odd irregularities in the process of “updating” votes — exactly 100 at a time — in favor of Democrat Al Franken in Minnesota’s closely contested Senate race:

Optical scan ballots are used nearly everywhere in Minnesota. The system is simple: once the polls close, absentee ballots are run through the machines with Republican and Democratic poll watchers both present. The machines are then locked down. The machine prints a tape that looks like a grocery store printout that summarizes the number of votes cast for each candidate in each race. At the same time, the totals are uploaded electronically, via a secure phone line connected to the box, to the county where the precinct is located; from there, they are reported to the Secretary of State. The tape showing the precinct’s vote totals is signed by the precinct’s election judge and is required to be publicly displayed.

There is essentially no human input here. There is no room for new ballots to be “discovered,” or for counting “errors” to be corrected. The process is electronic. My understanding had been that optical scan voting is in use in every one of Minnesota’s several thousand precincts. Based on the Strib’s account of what happened in Partridge Township, it appears this may not be the case…

UPDATE: Hot off the press, the first apparent evidence of fraud. Last night at around 7:30, a precinct in Mountain Iron, St. Louis County, mysteriously updated its vote total to add 100 new votes–all 100 for Barack Obama and Al Franken.

Mountain Iron uses optical scanning, so the Coleman campaign asked for a copy of the tape documenting the ballots cast on election night. St. Louis County responded by providing a tape that includes the newly-added 100 votes, and is dated November 2–the Sunday before the election. St. Louis County reportedly denies being able to produce the genuine tape from election night, even though Minnesota law, as I understand it, requires that tape to be signed by the election judges and publicly displayed.