Will Norm Coleman get a fair shake in his Senatorial recount battle against Al Franken?

Minneapolis Star-Tribune columnist Katherine Kersten is skeptical, given the fact that Minnesota's Secretary of State was elected with the help of the Secretary of State Project, a group funded in part by George Soros and his ultraliberal acolytes, that was expressly created to elect Democrats to the post crucial to insure the integrity of the voting process.:

 

Let's assume the 32 disputed ballots in Minneapolis were legitimate. Let's assume the newly discovered 100 votes in Pine County -- all for Al Franken -- were just overlooked by a sleepy official, and the 100 votes found in Mountain Iron -- again, all for Franken -- were valid.

Let's suppose the trickle of votes moving inexorably in Franken's direction is just a function of a normal process, as Secretary of State Mark Ritchie's office assures us.

One fact remains troubling. The referee in Minnesota's hotly contested Senate race must act in a nonpartisan fashion, yet Ritchie came to office through a nationwide partisan strategy. He was elected in 2006 as part of a national campaign to ensure that Democrats could wield influence in precisely the sort of hair's breadth race we now have here.

Ritchie gained office with the help of the Secretary of State Project (SOS), an independent 527 group co-founded by former MoveOn.org leader James Rucker. SOS is based in San Francisco, and is funded in part by ultra-liberal kingmakers such as George Soros.

Secretary of state positions are a "new front" in the "battle for political control," the paper explained, because they are "the obscure but vital state offices that determine who votes and how those votes are counted."

"National Democratic groups ... are pouring resources" into secretary of state races in key swing states, in order to enhance their control in future tight elections, said the paper. Minnesota was one of the top six states targeted.

Up in Two Harbors, another liberal outpost, Mr. Franken picked up an additional 246 votes. In Partridge Township, he racked up another 100. Election officials in both places claim they initially miscommunicated the numbers. Odd, because in the Two Harbors precinct, none of the other contests recorded any changes in their vote totals.

According to conservative statistician John Lott, Mr. Franken's gains so far are 2.5 times the corrections made for Barack Obama in the state, and nearly three times the gains for Democrats across Minnesota Congressional races. Mr. Lott notes that Mr. Franken's "new" votes equal more than all the changes for all the precincts in the entire state for the Presidential, Congressional and statehouse races combined (482 votes).

This entire process is being overseen by Democratic Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, who isn't exactly a nonpartisan observer. One of Mr. Ritchie's financial supporters during his 2006 run for office was a 527 group called the Secretary of State Project, which was co-founded by James Rucker, who came from MoveOn.org. The group says it is devoted to putting Democrats in jobs where they can "protect elections."