Ryan Flynn the newest contributor to Minnesota Democrats Exposed put up what I can only guess will be his first of many boob-tacular posts.  He decides to take on the missing 133 votes in Minneapolis and he lays an egg so magnificent that it’s hard to imagine him surpassing it without really trying.

Might it be that what Minneapolis election officials said initially is actually the case, that these 133 ballots were run through the machine twice! Does not seem that far off, if we were going off of strictly what the machine totals were then why did we have the recount in the first place?

This piece of tripe has been repeated by Republicans since a very early account of the missing ballots suggested that 133 ballots with write-in votes were run twice by election workers in the ward.

Minneapolis elections director Cindy Reichert said she believes the error occurred when election judges at the precinct on election night mistakenly ran ballots with write-in candidates through a counting machine twice. There were 129 such ballots.

It is hard to rationalize that there were more than 133 ballots with write in candidates, because why would only a percentage of those votes be run though?  So, let’s assume (as most everyone does) that Reichert meant that all 133 votes with write-ins in the precinct were run twice.  This is pretty easily proven.  Everyone pick a random odd integer between 1 and 133, now multiply it by two.

I’ll wait for the Republicans out there to get their calculators.

What did you get?  An even number.  This means two things, the smallest possible number of write-in votes possible is 2 (if only one person wrote in a vote for X District Judge XX and his vote was run twice, there would be two write-in votes for the office) and it would mean that there would be no odd number of write-in votes for any office.

Feel free to go look at the results for Ward 3 Precint 1 at the Secretary of State’s website.  What do you notice?  Multiple odd write-in vote totals, and several write-in vote totals of just 1 vote.

Simple multiplication tables 1, Ryan Flynn 0. Moving swiftly along to the second most absurd assertion in his post.

This precinct is a college precinct at the University of Minnesota. It is entirely possible that lines caused students to wait, sign in and then realize that they would not make it to class and had to rush off.

I live in the precinct immediately next to Ward 3 Precint 1 — 3-2.  So just to go off of my relatively similar experience, after signing in, I waited for approximately 10 minutes before I was able to go into the booth and finish my ballot.  Like many of the other people around me, I didn’t wait until reaching the booth to start filling in my ballot, I started to fill in the bubbles while waiting in line.  In short: I didn’t have to wait very long after signing in, espescially in comparison to the fourty-five minutes I waited in line before signing in.  As well, I spent election day doing GOTV around campus and I can say that I don’t think I saw a single person leave the lines to vote.  But, what Ryan is proposing is that out of 1,976 voters 133 decided that after waiting in line for up to an hour they weren’t going to follow through with the last 10 minutes, so they left.  In other words — about 7 percent of the voters didn’t vote.

Yeah, that’s pretty hard to believe.

And finally, the single most absurd thing I’ve read all day:

Whatever it really might be, my money is on the fact that these ballots never existed to begin with.

Excuse me?  Did he actually just say that he thought the ballots didn’t exist?  So the 133 reported ballots were a mistake?  As far as I know, this would be the first time anyone has suggested that.  Or is there something that Mr. Flynn should share with us?  Some insider information?  Espescially considering that the vote total reported for this precinct matched the voter rolls for that day.

It’s galling that anyone would treat our civic religion so cavalierly.  There are 133 missing votes and hey! it’s no big deal according to Mr. Flynn.  Thats unnacceptable, and if I was Mr. Flynn I’d think about that the next time you go vote — ‘cause hey, if your vote goes missing — it’s no big deal.