Nor had I.

If we can stand the glacial pace of the recount/contest/whatever-comes-next, the Franken-Coleman post-election saga is providing an amazing education in the many quirks, vagaries and oopsies of voting. One of the lessons is that there is not always a right answer to questions raised by said vagaries. We have to gradually get used to the idea that there may be no result that everyone will agree is fair. Whoever loses will almost certainly believe that if certain very close calls had gone the other way ...

At the trial Friday morning (monitored via internet by your humble and obedient ink-stained wretch) Coleman lawyer Joe Friedberg questioned Anoka County Elections Manager Rachel Smith about a ballot, sent in by a soldier on overseas duty, in which all of the votes were write-ins. This is a special privilege afforded to servicemen and other far-away voters. If they apply for an absentee ballot and don't receive it in time, they are allowed to use something called a Federal Absentee Write-in Ballot, which they can acquire from one of their officers, or even download from the internet. It has blanks for the voter to write in the name of the person she/he prefers for president, senator and the U.S. House, because they haven't been able to obtain a ballot that has the names of the candidates pre-printed on it.

In fact, as an even more special dispensation for the far-away status, these voters can sijmply write the word "Democrat" or "Republican" on their ballot and it will be counted as a straight party-line vote for that party's candidates for federal offices. I saw one of these come through the Canvassing Board during the recount. When I heard that a ballot that simply had the word "Republican" scrawled on it, I laughed to think that anyone would entertain the idea of counting such a ballot. Stupid me. It was counted as a vote for Norm Coleman (and would have been counted as a vote for John McCain as well, if that race had been the subject of the recount).

In a later conversation with Ramsey County election guru Joe Mansky, he told me that these ballots were originally known as, and are sometimes still called "submarine ballots." They came into use decades ago, Mansky believes the mid-70s, at the height of the Cold War. In those dark days, nuclear submarines, armed with nuclear missiles that could be launched from the ocean's surface, were a vital part of the "nuclear triad." The subs were the final guarantee that if the Soviets started a surprise nuclear war and knocked out all U.S. missile silos and shot down all Strategic Air Command nuclear bombers, the U.S. retaliatory capability could still rise from the sea and turn the Soviet Union into a wasteland. The sailors on these subs were often submerged for months at a time, and their locations even when they came up for air were top secret. They not only were unlikely to get the absentee ballots that their home counties were trying to mail to them, but also might be undersea between the conventions and the election, so they might not even know who their party had nominated for president. So, under the "submarine ballot" program, they could just write what party they preferred and still have their votes counted.

How cool is that?