You can now retire the “Bush stole the 2000 election” nonsense. As the WSJ outlines precisely, Al Franken and his gang of partisan thugs has stolen the senatorial election in Minnesota, in ways hitherto unimagined.

“Strange things keep happening in Minnesota, where the disputed recount in the Senate race between Norm Coleman and Al Franken may be nearing a dubious outcome. Thanks to the machinations of Democratic Secretary of State Mark Ritchie and a meek state Canvassing Board, Mr. Franken may emerge as an illegitimate victor.
[Review & Outlook] AP

Mr. Franken started the recount 215 votes behind Senator Coleman, but he now claims a 225-vote lead and suddenly the man who was insisting on “counting every vote” wants to shut the process down. He’s getting help from Mr. Ritchie and his four fellow Canvassing Board members, who have delivered inconsistent rulings and are ignoring glaring problems with the tallies.

Under Minnesota law, election officials are required to make a duplicate ballot if the original is damaged during Election Night counting. Officials are supposed to mark these as “duplicate” and segregate the original ballots. But it appears some officials may have failed to mark ballots as duplicates, which are now being counted in addition to the originals. This helps explain why more than 25 precincts now have more ballots than voters who signed in to vote. By some estimates this double counting has yielded Mr. Franken an additional 80 to 100 votes.

This disenfranchises Minnesotans whose vote counted only once. And one Canvassing Board member, State Supreme Court Justice G. Barry Anderson, has acknowledged that “very likely there was a double counting.” Yet the board insists that it lacks the authority to question local officials and it is merely adding the inflated numbers to the totals.”

There is much more, read the rest. The Supreme Court in Minnesota, nearly Democrat to a core, refused to give Minnesotians their constitutional right to have their vote counted. Subsequently the Coleman campaign will be taking the suit even higher, possibly to the SCOTUS.

I have a better idea. How about the DOJ gets off it’s ass and begin an investigation into what is clearly – as no other recent election has been this obvious – voter fraud.

At the same time they should begin to look into Secretary of State Mark Richie and his partisan activities, who over the weekend joined forces with the partisan liberal video-blog The UpTake to provide a live video feed of last week’s State Canvassing Board meeting.

I call on the Governor of Minnesota to halt this outright theft of our sacred voting process.