Blog House: The bull's-eye: Mark Ritchie

By Tim O'Brien

Last update: November 12, 2008 - 6:22 PM

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One thing we’ve learned from the 2008 election is that, in a close contest, the National Republican Senatorial Committee will do what campaign committees do best: attack, attack, attack. Even after the votes have been cast.

So, after months of trying to demonize Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Al Franken, Republican Sen. Norm Coleman still wound up with a lead of 206 votes and an automatic recount. Now the NRSC has trained its sights on Minnesota’s DFL secretary of state, Mark Ritchie. Zachary Roth at TPM Muckraker had the details.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) has been distributing to reporters a three-page “backgrounder” that attacks Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, a Democrat, for having spoken at the Democratic convention this summer, and for having “led a voter registration coalition that included ACORN,” among other alleged sins. … [T]here’s no evidence that Ritchie has ever used his role as the state’s top elections administrator to advantage Democrats. But that likely misses the point of the GOP gambit, which appears to be to cast public doubt on the integrity of the recount process, thereby bolstering Coleman’s claim that’s he’s the rightful winner and that a recount is unnecessary — just the strategy pursued by George Bush’s campaign in Florida in 2000.

And like clockwork, the GOP bobos, starting with Fox News and some conservative columnists like John Lott, have read the script and are reciting their lines faithfully. The NRSC also has started a website, MinnesotaRecount.com, to serve as a clearinghouse for theories. The Admiral at Lake Minnetonka Liberty floated the ACORN connection.

We’ve got a crooked political hack in Mark Ritchie, the Secretary of State, we’ve got the usual voter fraud people in ACORN, and there is, I believe, cheating going on. … Remember, Mark Ritchie is in bed with ACORN, so he’s hardly a credible guy.

Other bloggers jumped on the fact that Coleman’s margin since election night has gone from more than 800 votes to 206. But Marc Ambinder said no one should be surprised by this development:

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