Topic: Newsmax
Newsmax published numerous false and misleading claims about the post-election battle between Al Franken and Norm Coleman -- all of it designed to make Franken and his supporters look bad. Now that the contest is finally over with Coleman conceding defeat following a Minnesota Supreme Court decision, Newsmax isn't taking it as graciously as Coleman did.
A July 1 Newsmax article by Dave Eberhart asserts that "the sting of controversy has not lifted entirely from the field," uncritically quoting Michael Thielen the Republican National Lawyers Association as saying Franken "owes his victory to being selected by a Secretary of State instead of being chosen by the voters," adding:
"Coleman was defeated in November 2006 when the George Soros-backed Secretary of State Project poured money into [replacing] a competent secretary of state with an inexperienced political hack."
"This political hack, Mark Ritchie," he adds, "disenfranchised military voters, treated people differently based on the county they lived, and even ignored the attorney general’s opinion of absentee ballots all in his effort to deliver the Senate seat to Franken."
Eberhart failed to note that the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled unanimously in rejecting such arguments:
1. Appellants did not establish that, by requiring proof that statutory absentee voting standards were satisfied before counting a rejected absentee ballot, the trial court‟s decision constituted a post-election change in standards that violates substantive due process.
2. Appellants did not prove that either the trial court or local election officials violated the constitutional guarantee of equal protection.
3. The trial court did not abuse its discretion when it excluded additional evidence.
4. Inspection of ballots under Minn. Stat. § 209.06 (2008) is available only on a showing that the requesting party cannot properly be prepared for trial without an inspection. Because appellants made no such showing here, the trial court did not err in denying inspection.
5. The trial court did not err when it included in the final election tally the election day returns of a precinct in which some ballots were lost before the manual recount.
Eberhart goes out of his way to avoid giving any credit to Franken for his victory; he quotes others who claimed that Coleman presented a flawed case and a professor who claimed that "Franken was lucky ... and Coleman was unlucky."
