There are so many intricacies in the Minnesota election that it would be hard to list them all in one spot. For example, both the Republicans and the Democrats claim that the other party is trying to “steal” the election. I, admittedly, don’t know much about the ins and outs of the “who is stealing what” scenario, but I think that the rest of America has two very easy solutions for Minnesota.

Solution Number 1: Count each vote over again and come to a resolution on who had the most votes. Alright, I understand that there are allegations of vote tampering on either side of the election and that there was even allegations of more votes being counted in a district than eligible voters. Okay, fine. If Franken and Coleman can’t agree to that then…

Solution Number 2: Have a do over! My God, it worked in grade school during recess and gym class – maybe we could learn something from the simplicity of children who realize that they aren’t fully aware of what happened and thus opt to give it another shot. It’s obvious that no matter who wins the election in Minnesota that there will be lingering feelings of outrage and anger so why not just close this ugly chapter and have another election?

The Minnesota issue needs to be solved sooner rather than later. This is not a good thing for the democracy in that state or this nation.

• Senator Barack Obama received 52.92% of the popular vote while Senator John McCain received 45.67% of the popular vote. This compares to 2004 when President George Bush received 50.74% of the popular vote while Senator John Kerry received 48.27% of the popular vote.
• In terms of the total vote count, Obama received 69,456,884 votes while McCain received 59,934,813 votes. This is remarkable because Obama won this election by about 9 and a half million votes. For comparison’s sake, Bush received 62,040,610 votes in 2004 while Kerry received 59,028,444 votes.
• In total, there were 131,237,589 votes cast in 2008 versus 122,267,553 votes cast in 2004. This represents an increase of 8,970,036 votes in 2008 than in 2004.
• The total voter turnout as a percentage of eligible voters was approximately 63%. This percentage is the highest voter turnout since 1960, when 64.8% of eligible voters turned out.
• The increased “youth” vote only represented one additional percentage point in the overall voter turnout. In other words, the youth vote increased by only 1,312,376 votes – certainly not the huge bump that everyone expected

So there is an updated look at the 2008 voter turnout in comparison to the 2004 voter turnout. The 2008 was still an historic election and there was a giant leap in voter turnout, but it is worth mentioning that the youth turnout was not as big as was expected – further proving that just because far-left, anti-war, anti-Bush college students received increased coverage during this election season by a liberal national media, their groundswell of activism does not adequately represent the feelings of their peers. That might be the most interesting piece of information coming out of the 2008 election…