Here's Hoping For A Coleman/Franken Senatorial Tie (And Not The Kind You Wear With A Clean Shirt)

According to the official website for the office of the Minnesota Secretary of State, of approximately three million votes cast, incumbent U.S. Senator Norm Coleman received 1,211,590 votes on November 4th, whereas his Democratic challenger, Al Franken, received 1,211, 375 votes. This means that on election night, Norm Coleman appeared to have won the narrowest of victories, with a difference of only 215 votes, or about .007%. (If no one else, at least this leaves Sean Connery with a superficial reason to smile....) Nearly half a million votes went to other candidates, the majority of which were cast for Independent candidate Dean Barkley.

Since the vote was razor-thin, a statewide hand-recount took place, and as a result Senator Coleman's lead has slipped to somewhere between 188 and 192 votes, depending on which presently "unofficial" totals one believes; the media is rather uniformly reporting that Senator Coleman leads by 192 votes, but the aforementioned web-site seems to suggest that the lead is 188 votes. As these totals shift slightly from time to time, they both might be obsolete by the time you read this. And with absentee ballots in question (and due to be reviewed and perhaps recounted), as well as challenged ballots that need to be examined, this race could still tip just barely in either direction...a month and a half after election day.

No matter what we keep hearing about a possible "fillibuster-proof majority" in the U.S. senate, just remember this: it's all a bunch of crappola, because you need to get everyone who makes up such a mythical majority to agree unifromly in order to bring it about in any functional manner, and even then it might only work once or twice, given that legislators feel differently about different pieces of legislation and someone is bound to throw a monkey wrench into her or his party's plans at any given time. And, anyway, it looks as though the Democrats will fall short of the number necessary for such a headline-motivated, phantom majority.

So the results of this U.S. senate race will not tip the scales heavily in either direction--the Democrats will have a big but not all-powerful majority in the U.S. senate one way or the other. Given that, at the national level, I'm at present far more comfortable with the Democrats than the innovation-starved, rather rudderless Republicans, I'm happy with this outcome. Yet I also remain wary of giving either party too much power, which means that I am pleased that the Democrats haven't cracked, say, the sixty seat ceiling (out of the 100 that make up the body), which would be a psychological back-breaker for the Republicans and for many fans of somewhat centrist senate policies.

What we're left with in this Coleman-Franken saga, then, isn't an epoch-defining moment, but more like a bit of a national senate curiosity (as if we haven't had enough of those in recent years). For my part, I know that when the dust settles (whenever that might be), I should be hoping that Al Franken (barely) wins. I did vote for him, after all. Yet I find myself hoping for something else: an exact tie between the two candidates. The chances of that happening are very, very small, but I keep thinking, well, a guy can hope....

I want a tied outcome so that my home state of Minnesota is forced to change its rules for U.S. senate races in order to bring them in line with some other states that require senators to win a majority of votes cast--if not in the initial, more crowded candidate field on election day, then in a run-off between the top two vote-getters a month later. Let's face it--whoever "wins" this Minnesota U.S. senate race received about (or perhaps slightly less than) 42% of the overall vote on election day. I suppose that's okay if the next closest candidate received, say, 35%, but that didn't happen this time, so whoever wins isn't going to seem legitimate.

Besides, if the outcome were to be a rather miraculous tie, wouldn't the state have to hold a run-off between Mr. Coleman and Mr. Franken in January, or at least something like that? That would force Minnesota to change the rules, for sure. One way or the other, they need to be changed.