Court Awards Votes to Franken in Coleman's U.S. Senate Election Contest in MN

by Brad Friedman

 

Even as the Republican argues to include ballots of voters who forged signatures and ballots they previously rejected

While Norm Coleman may believe that "God wants [him] to serve," the voters of MN, and a ruling yesterday from the 3-judge panel presiding over his U.S. Senate election contest, still seem to indicate otherwise.

Yes, at it turns out, something actually happened during Coleman's ongoing trial yesterday, and it resulted in still more votes for Al Franken.

That, and other late developments follow...

Franken Gets 24 More

A ruling from the court [PDF], found that some 24 Franken voters who'd filed to have their rejected absentee ballots counted, could, in fact, now have them counted. Eric Kleefeld of TPM does the heavy lifting for us on this one...

The Minnesota election court has now taken some kind of meaningful action, handing down a ruling [PDF] on a summary judgment motion that will now allow the counting of some --- but not all --- of a group of Franken-voters who filed a motion to have their rejected ballots counted. The ruling gives us some hints as to where things will go from here --- and it's not good news for Norm Coleman.

Out of over 60 voters who filed this motion, the court is ordering just 24 ballots to be counted at this time. The opinion lays out a pretty stringent standard for letting previously-rejected ballots in: It has to be demonstrated that the voter either fully complied with the relevant laws and procedures, and thus the rejection was wholly a clerical error, or that any actual non-compliance was credibly the fault of the election official.

An example of this second category would be if a voter pro-actively asked whether they were registered to vote, were told yes and provided an absentee ballot for a registered voter, but it turned out they really needed to re-register. This is a tough standard to meet, and will mean that the number of people who qualify for it will be a fairly limited number.
...
So how does this relate to Norm Coleman's chances? He's currently fishing in a pool of nearly 4,800 rejected ballots, trying to get a bunch of them in. But this ruling seems to indicate he's not going to get very many of them in --- indeed, these 60 were some of Franken's best cases, and he's only scored on just over a third of them. Norm is casting a much wider net, so the success rate will probably be far lower.

The additional 24 votes (actually, just 23 for the moment, since a question still remains about one of them), will not be added to the official total immediately, as the Franken camp has declined to do so until after the trial has run its full course. So the official tally still remains Franken +225 over Coleman, for the moment.

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