The Minnesota Senate contest between Norm Coleman and Al Franken is getting more brutal by the day. Coleman’s lead over Franken is drifting downward as “corrections’ seem to favor Franken. The Coleman campaign is crying foul. What is particularly interesting is the role played by Minnesota’s Secretary of State, Mark Ritchie, under whose auspices these totals are being corrected and compiled.

He is not only a Democrat but was elected with the financial help of a group of wealthy Democrats whose goal was to elect Democrats to fill the Secretary of States positions-a key position of power given the importance of the these officials to ensure the honesty and integrity of the voting process. I wrote about this stealth strategy before  Ohio’s voting procedures were controversial and the decisions made by that Secretary of State (Brunner)  effectively favoring Barack Obama were criticized. She, too, was elected with the help of that same group of Democrats formed to elect Secretary of States in key battlegrounds. 

Now we see another manifestation of this strategy: Minnesota’s Secretary of State was elected with the same type of help.

A background document distributed by national Republicans portrays Ritchie as a far-left, Democratic version of Katherine Harris, the former Republican secretary of state whose actions helped decide the 2000 presidential election. The document accuses Ritchie, who was elected in 2006 with the assistance of a progressive-led group designed to elected Democratic election administrators, of having connections to the controversial voter registration group ACORN and the Communist Party of America.

No doubt that Ritchie and the Democrats will keep counting - and counting - until somehow, enough votes are "found" to give Franken the victory.