The outcome of the Minnesota election for the Senate was predictable, so the only wonder was that it took so long for it to be ‘decided’.

Or…..announced. It was decided early on. The WSJ editorial board’s take on it sounds very familiar to Chicagoans.

The unfortunate lesson is that you don’t need to win the vote on Election Day as long as your lawyers are creative enough to have enough new or disqualified ballots counted after the fact.

How did this break down?

Mr. Franken trailed Mr. [Norm] Coleman by 725 votes after the initial count on election night, and 215 after the first canvass. The Democrat’s strategy from the start was to manipulate the recount in a way that would discover votes that could add to his total. The Franken legal team swarmed the recount, aggressively demanding that votes that had been disqualified be added to his count, while others be denied for Mr. Coleman.

But the team’s real goldmine were absentee ballots, thousands of which the Franken team claimed had been mistakenly rejected. While Mr. Coleman’s lawyers demanded a uniform standard for how counties should re-evaluate these rejected ballots, the Franken team ginned up an additional 1,350 absentees from Franken-leaning counties. By the time this treasure hunt ended, Mr. Franken was 312 votes up, and Mr. Coleman was left to file legal briefs.

Here’s a key point:

Mr. Coleman didn’t lose the election. He lost the fight to stop the state canvassing board from changing the vote-counting rules after the fact.

Bottom line:

Mr. Franken now goes to the Senate having effectively stolen an election.

No matter how familiar this style of politics has become, wisened citizens are still taken aback by it. And Republicans are continually just….still….taken.