Cheating and the Cheating Cheats Who Do It

Ann Coulter is in fine form in her column this week.

It's bad enough that the Republican Party can't prevent Democrats from voting in its primaries and saddling us with The New York Times' favorite Republican as our presidential nominee. If the Republican Party can't protect an election won by the incumbent U.S. senator in Minnesota, there is no point in donating to the Republican Party.

The day after the November election, Republican Sen. Norm Coleman had won his re-election to the U.S. Senate, beating challenger Al Franken by 725 votes.

Then one heavily Democratic town miraculously discovered 100 missing ballots. And, in another marvel, they were all for Al Franken! It was like a completely evil version of a Christmas miracle.

As strange as it was that all 100 post-election, "discovered" ballots would be for one candidate, it was even stranger that the official time stamp for the miracle ballots printed out by the voting machine on the miracle ballots showed that the votes had been cast on Nov. 2 -- two days before the election.

Those votes were accepted as valid.

Then another 400-odd statistically improbable "corrections" were made in other Democratic strongholds until -- by the end of election week -- Coleman's lead had been whittled down to a mere 215 votes.

The counting isn't over in Minnesota yet, and it won't be until the Democrats in charge of the elections can make the votes come out on Franken's side. The instant that happens, the election will be declared certified and Franken will be the winner.

Surely I jest, right?

Coulter describes other examples of Democrats doing the same or worse. There are even two cases where the Democrat-controlled Congress (the Senate in 1974 and the House in 1984) refused to accept the certified results that gave the election to Republicans and overturned the election in favor of the Democratic candidate.

So don't be surprised when, despite Norm Coleman's 725-vote win on election day, Al Franken jets off to Washington DC to take the Minnesota Senate seat. It won't be fair, but that's what cheating cheaters do.