Watchdog: Feds Were Asleep at the Switch When Minnesota Felons Went to the Polls

The group that uncovered evidence of large-scale illegal voting by felons in Minnesota's contested 2008 Senate race says the whole mess might have been prevented if the federal government had just done its job.

The federal government is required under the Civil Rights Act and the Help America Vote Act to make sure that states purge their voter rolls of ineligible voters — the dead, those who have moved, felons, undocumented immigrants, etc. — and to ensure that elections are administered and conducted fairly, said Dan McGrath, executive director of Minnesota Majority.

But the conservative watchdog group's review of Minnesota's voting records found that the government apparently did not fulfill that obligation in the state in 2008, which in turn affected the number of voters whose ballots were counted -- and possibly the outcome of the dead-heat election.

The group's recently published report found that hundreds of felons voted in the election in which Al Franken, a Democrat, beat then-incumbent Republican Sen. Norm Coleman by just 312 votes out of more than 3 million cast -- a margin that was determined after six months of legal challenges and recounts.

The report, using public election records, state felony conviction documents and hand-sorted searches of voting rosters, found “irrefutable evidence” that hundreds of felons voted illegally in the election, and that the number of felons whose votes were wrongly counted exceeded the margin by which Franken beat Coleman.

(from Foxnews.com)