Playing the Recount and Playing with Fire -- More on Maffei - Buerkle

In an earlier post ("Countdown with Dan Maffei"), I referred to the "no stone left unturned" strategy apparently being employed by the Maffei campaign, when it came to contacting absentee voters regarding how they voted.  It occurs to me that there is one more stone that might be turned over--coaching absentee voters to respond strategically (i.e., lie) when contacted by the opposing campaign.  Hopefully we don't reach that.

Remember, the likely purpose of finding out how citizens cast their absentee votes is so that you know which ballot signatures to challenge and which to leave alone--at the signature examination stage of the process, all you have is signatures; the vote is inside the envelope and unknown.  Therefore, if a Buerkle voter was contacted by the Maffei campaign and asked how she voted, she'd be advancing the chances of her candidate to say that she voted for Maffei, as they'd then leave that one alone.  And vice-versa.

I'm also reminded of a story I heard about another race in the region, which went down to just a handful of votes, and in which a successful challenge of a few ballots by one campaign actually knocked out its own votes.