Until now, Minnesota was always famous for its clean elections. Indeed, Democratic consultant Bob Beckel recently attested to the honesty of Minnesota's elections, joking: "Believe me. I've tried. I've tried every way around the system out there, and it doesn't work."

But that was before Minnesota encountered the pushiest, most aggressive, most unscrupulous person who has ever sought public office, Al Franken.

On Election Day, Franken lost the U.S. Senate race in Minnesota to the Republican incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman by 725 votes. But over the next week, Democratic counties keep discovering new votes for Franken and subtracting votes from Coleman, claiming to be correcting "typos."

In all, Franken picked up 459 votes and Coleman lost 60 votes from these alleged "corrections."

As the inestimable economist John Lott pointed out, the "corrections" in the Senate race generated more new votes for Franken than all the votes added by corrections in every race in the entire state -- presidential, congressional, state house, sanitation commissioner and dogcatcher -- combined.

And yet the left-wing, George Soros-backed Secretary of State, Mark Ritchie, stoutly defended the statistically impossible "corrected" votes. There's something fishy going on in Minnesota besides the annual bigmouth bass tournament.

Fortunately, the very outrageousness of the "corrections" scam brought national attention to the Minnesota recount, at which point it became more difficult to keep "finding" votes for Franken. Under the glare of the national media, the steady accretion of post-election ballots for Franken came to a screeching halt, rather like a child who, after being caught red-handed, tactfully removes his hand from the cookie jar.

As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said, sunlight is the best disinfectant. (Although, having met Franken, I would add that actual disinfectant might not be a bad idea either.)

Since then, the state has been conducting a meticulous hand recount and, despite a suspicious delay from liberal Hennepin County and a suspicious late-vote discovery from liberal Ramsey County, Coleman has consistently held a lead of 200 to 300 votes. (That's not including the 519 votes that were stolen -- or "corrected" -- from Coleman immediately after the election when no one was paying attention.)

As of Wednesday, with 93 percent of the votes recounted, Coleman holds a 295-vote lead. At no point since the first count after the election has Franken been ahead.

The famously honest people of Minnesota probably think this means the recount is almost over. But like a bad Al Franken sketch on "Saturday Night Live," I predict this recount will keep going on and on and on for no apparent reason.

To understand what is happening in Minnesota, one must turn to the Washington state gubernatorial election of 2004.

As in Minnesota this year, the Republican candidate kept winning and winning, but the Democrats refused to concede, instead demanding endless recounts. Meanwhile, Democratic precincts kept "discovering" new ballots for the Democrat, Chris Gregoire.

Six days after the election on Nov. 10, 2004, Republican Dino Rossi was ahead by 3,492 votes. But five days later, heavily Democratic King County election officials actually claimed to "find" 10,000 uncounted ballots! And they favored Gregoire!

Nonetheless, after a full recount, Rossi was still ahead, but this time by only 42 votes.

So the Democrats demanded a third recount -- and King County continued its miraculous ballot-"finding" trick, which continued to favor Gregoire.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Democrat election officials were "finding" new votes as much as they needed to find new votes. Here are 10,000 new votes. You need more? OK, back to work!

Eventually, King County found enough provisional and absentee ballots to put Democrat Gregoire in the lead -- and this result was immediately certified by the weenie Republican secretary of state.

Republicans are always accused of being sharks; I wish they'd rise to the level of minnows. Continued...