With help from state officialdom and local courts, Al Franken's theft of an election is being carried off unabashedly in full view.  'Tis a pity.

Not even attentive observers of post-election hi-jinks in Minnesota know details of the titanic struggle between onetime TV comic writer Al Franken and Senator Norm Coleman (R-MN) for a United States Senate seat. It's a battle assuming Kafkaesque proportions, darkly surreal, an election being stolen in slow motion, in full view, not at all subtly . . .

Think of Marcellus's line (not Hamlet's, as often assumed), "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark." (Act 1, Scene 4). Before that line in Shakespeare's blood-drenched tragedy, Hamlet refers to his home state, Denmark, as a cold place "of things rank and gross." So it goes today, we fear, alas and alack, too, in my native state, bitterkalt Minnesota, once thought politically squeaky clean. No longer. Franken changed all that in 2008. Will the ghost of 2004 Washington State's gubernatorial election prevail, with "votes" pulled out of the ether, until eventually the Democrat, in that case Governor Christine Gregoire, wins? What madness prevails in these post-election scraps? What frenzy to grasp power?

(Breaking news: The Minnesota Supreme Court handed challenger Al Franken still another victory, judicially, in a ruling that ballots not counted previously, being presumably "mistakenly rejected," are to be included in the post-election re-count which is, of course, a contradiction in terms. So much for legal hypocrisy. Looks like this baby is headed for the U.S. Supreme Court.)

After the actual election, taped polling place totals showed Senator Coleman won with a slim 750-margin victory out of 2.9 million votes legally cast, and counted. That was then, before the funny stuff began. Power behind ex-"Saturday Night Live" comedy writer Franken rolled up their collective sleeves and went to work to erase Coleman's margin.

With the election so narrowly decided, Franken and his advisers (including even dour Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid, D-NV), decided to try to reverse the result. In subsequent weeks every "legal" move and some extralegal struck pay dirt for Franken and his corps of party lawyers. Some were imported from the Washington State debacle. Experience counts. As if pulled out of a magician's hat, votes materialized out of thin air for Franken — an even hundred here, another 39 "lost ballots" there, all for Franken, a statistical impossibility, like levitation.

This was a slight departure from King County in Washington, where to-be Governor Gregoire found most of her trove of new, "uncounted" votes. She naturally won in the end when the counting stopped as fate (?) would have it.

As for her ideological (liberal Democrat) kin in Minnesota, Franken's "newly found" votes came from Democratic strongholds statewide, not in a single county or two.

Minnesota's deeply dug-in political party, the DFL (for "Democrat Farmer Labor") had asserted its influence, starting with the state Secretary of State's office in St. Paul, occupied by a full-blown Democrat left to "oversee" the election procedures. (Fox and hen house, anyone?)

So newly-minted votes were "discovered" statewide, in obscure places such as Mountain Iron on the Mesabi Iron Range, and in Two Harbors on Lake Superior. And the margin of Senator Coleman's already razor-thin victory shrunk daily, non-proportionally, as if to meet some Election Goal of Party Gods.

It amounts to Chicago-style fraud on the run, except in this case, registered voters' names were NOT taken from tombstones. Most came from a pool of what are described as "mistakenly rejected" ballots. At one point this pool was 6,000 ballots. Enough, certainly, to flip an election if properly manipulated. It all came down in the end (note my use of past tense!) to absentee ballots in a "fifth column."

Not a "fifth column" that is a guerrilla force behind enemy lines. No, this "fifth column" — still, an apt term — was a gambit to put Al Franken over the top. It is devilishly simple, too, with all the earmarks of what George Orwell called about politics "giving an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

With the late post-election entry of "fifth column" ballots, it becomes Florida 2000 all over again, only without the chads. It would take the Godly powers to divine correctly the intent, or non-intent, of the absentee voter. The marching of "fifth column" ballots into this election becomes a key to victory for Franken, and validation that his slimiest-ever campaign in Minnesota history, has paid off. (In the eleventh hour, Senator Coleman brought a defamation suit against the Franken Camp but it didn't take judicially. Why are we not surprised?)

Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, who achieved his office with the unstinting support (read, $$$) of George Soros's pot of gold, and ACORN, is chairman of the state's Canvassing Board. What a catbird's seat for reshaping this election. The supposedly bipartisan board is supposed to oversee state election rules, thus to ensure fairness. In theory.

When the election turned out to be a virtual tie, Chairman Ritchie, whom the local blog Power Line has dubbed "The Man from ACORN," recommended all 87 counties segregate all rejected absentee ballots into five piles – or, columns. Four were to be reserved for ballots rejected strictly on the basis of statutory no-no's. The "fifth column," was a catch-all, none-of-these category. It became the "pool" relied upon by the Franken Camp and its followers to mine for votes, a fact not well known outside Minnesota, nor covered in wire reports.

With the tacit approval of the Canvassing Board, Chairman Ritchie recommended the "fifth column" ballots be given scrutiny, for possible insertion post-haste into the Nov. 4 election "recount" totals. Call them late-arrivals. On a 3-2 vote, the Minnesota Supreme Court (on Dec. 18) agreed to the Secretary of State's "fifth column" mischief. Got that? It may take a bit of mental gymnastics, but it boils down to counting votes NOT counted previously, and calling it a "recount." Orwell would chuckle at this mangling of the English language.

A St. Paul Pioneer Press reporter covering this circus, Rachel Stassen-Berger, brilliantly, and perceptively, put this three-word lead on her story of the astounding state Supreme Court ruling, as follows: "Can. Worms. Opened." Says it all.

The four explicit reasons for rejecting absentee ballots in Minnesota:

1. The voter didn't sign the ballot.

2. The voter was not registered.

3. The voter had already voted.

4. The voter's name, address and signature did not match the information on their absentee ballot application. Period.

Enter Big League blogger, Power Line's Hinderaker, a Minneapolis lawyer, to help us describe the "fifth column," and what later, what it portends for Minnesota:

The first four piles were to correspond with the four statutory grounds which, under Minnesota law, absentee ballots are to be disqualified. The fifth pile includes all ballots that don't clearly fall in any of the first four piles. These are conventionally referred to as the "wrongly rejected" absentee ballots.

Some counties followed Ritchie's suggestion, others ignored it. The request was, in a sense, odd on its face: Counties were being asked to review the absentee ballots they rejected on Nov. 4 and decide whether they want to change their minds [emphasis supplied here] but without any guidance as to what might cause them to do so.

So every county is to render its own determination, or none, as to which absentee ballots go into the fifth pile, thus potentially to be added to election day totals. Call this quintessential Kafkaesque. Now recall Franz Kafka's motto for his surreal Penal Colony,"Guilt is never to be doubted."

Local election officials are free to create, or do nothing, criteria for "mistakenly rejected" ballots, and please note, these ballots, all of them, are prejudged as "mistakenly rejected" at every turn? Astounding what passes for semantical logic in the courts these days.

Power Line's Hinderaker (www.powerlineblog.com) succinctly cuts to the chase, giving the scary potential for calamity infecting this bizarre, on-going vote-accumulating process:

It doesn't take much imagination to figure out that the most partisan counties will take the most liberal approach and put as many ballots as possible into the" fifth pile." Those counties are, without exception, controlled by the Democratic Party — Hennepin [generally, Minneapolis], Ramsey [St. Paul and environs] and St. Louis [Duluth and the one-party Iron Range]. They are also the state's biggest counties. Thus, giving the counties discretion to count whatever additional ballots [emphasis supplied] they deem appropriate, amounts to giving the Democratic Party a license to steal the election. Which is why the Coleman campaign wants the Supreme Court to at least issue a standard set of guidelines so that all counties, Republican and Democrat, are playing by the same rules.

Talk about an invitation for scandal. Just as in Florida when in 2000 that bunch of very partisan "Florida Supremes" did their ludicrous best to boost their guy Gore, into the presidency, under the deft public cover of "counting all the votes," a good ruse if ever there was. But on what basis on rules made up AFTER an election? Sounds like some sort of banana republic . . .

Observe closely what happens in Minnesota, folks. It presages what will happen in other contests decided post-election by lately "found" votes and "fifth columns." Counting those presumed "mistakenly rejected" ballots under all sorts of parochial and partisan standards, might well flip the election.

Now stealing an election is nasty business; it destroys public trust, fuels growing public cynicism about elections, and government itself. Dismissing the rule of law, side-stepping rules, making them up as you go, doing anything at all to advance your guy's candidacy, is a slippery slope to hell. Dishonestly matters. What is happening in my home state, Minnesota, in full view, brings tons of shame to Minnesota, perhaps an everlasting stain, even held to Chicago's tawdry political standards.

[Endnote: Yours truly predicted a post-election Franken win in this column on Nov. 6, titled "Minnesota Recount: Theater of Political Absurd." Click the title. When the smoke clears on the post-election shenanigans, the cold-hard fact remains that the Senatorial election in Minnesota might have been stolen BEFORE Election day. ACORN practically drags voters, some illegal, to the polls. Felons vote. Franken's legion of misstatements about Coleman's record, and his ethics, implying criminality, take root among the naive, uninformed electorate, evidence too of the power of nasty TV spots to bring down a candidate, with little at all to do with public issues. What's the word for this? Sad? No, it's tragedy in slow motion.]