The state Supreme Court has sided with Sen. Norm Coleman (R) in Minnesota’s contested Senate race, ruling to largely exclude hundreds of ballots Al Franken (D) had sought to include in the recount. The court in part overturned a decision by the state’s Board of Canvassers to recommend that Minnesota’s counties open and tally more than 1,000 absentee ballots that were not counted for any stated, legal reason. In its decision, the court forbade the board to include any of those ballots in its final tally, except in limited circumstances laid out in the decision.
“We order candidates Norm Coleman and Al Franken and their campaign representatives, the Secretary of State, and all county auditors and canvassing boards to establish and implement a process...for the purpose of identifying all absentee ballot envelopes that the local election officials and candidates agree were rejected in error,” Associate Justice Helen M. Meyer wrote in the majority decision.
Read Full Subject Related Article
Supreme Court Ruling (PDF 19pgs)
It is obvious that many MSN reporters and political experts?, claiming the MN Supreme Court ruled against Coleman, have not read and understood the MNSC’s ruling. ~ FlA
TAB
By the time you receive this email, the temporary lead that will present itself to Franken will have taken place – and throughout the day that temporary lead will grow. We expect that you will continue to see that happen throughout today and until every ballot that was legally and validly cast has been recounted and a total can be certified. So while varying headlines and a flurry of different numbers will continue, we encourage everyone to just hang on until the process is finished. When it is finished, Norm Coleman will still lead, and we believe, be re-elected to the United States Senate.
Also yesterday the Minnesota Supreme Court laid out an important decision regarding 5th Pile Ballots, and we are pleased that they’ve ordered all of the parties to get together and come up with a uniform, statewide standard to be used by each of the counties. To that end, we reached out to the Franken campaign last night in trying to get something worked out as soon as possible. Our lead counsel Fritz Knaak sent the following text in an email to the Franken campaign:
Gentlemen:
In light of today's request from the Minnesota State Canvassing Board that we jointly propose a plan for the Original/Duplicate Ballot double counting issue combined with today's ruling from the Supreme Court of Minnesota in Coleman v. Ritchie, we ask you to join us in the following.
Since the Supreme Court has ordered all county and local election officials, and the two campaigns, to find all absentee ballot envelopes that they agree were rejected in error by December 31, 2008, we propose that a reconciliation of the Duplicate/Original issue be part of that process in each jurisdiction. It is clear from the Supreme Court's opinion that "[t]he legislature has created processes for correction by country canvassing boards of 'obvious errors in the counting and recording of the votes.'" Where there are more votes than voters, that has clearly occurred.
As the Court noted, correction of such errors "should not be required to await an election contest in district court." Citing Andersen v. Donovan, 264 Minn. 257, 119 N.W.2d 1 (1962); Minn. Stat. 204B.44 (2006).
We propose that each campaign list every county or city in which it believes the Duplicate ballots made on election night to correct damaged ballots are not correctly reconciled with the Originals.
As each of those local Canvassing Boards meets as part of the Supreme Court ordered process for finding wrongly rejected absentee ballots, the campaigns will ensure that the Duplicate/Original issue is resolved and reconciled. The counties will then amend their results by the December 31 deadline so that accurate results are included in the Board's final certification of results.
If the campaigns believe it necessary, they will jointly seek an order from the Minnesota Supreme Court.
We hope you will join us in this effort to provide all Minnesotans with an accurate count in this election as quickly as possible. Without this effort, the Canvassing Board's certificate will lack the accuracy it should have to produce a credible result.
So now we settle in for another day of activity in the recount process.
# # # # #
An Important Update On The Recount Today
December 18th 2008 10:13 AM
Today, the State Canvassing Board will being to review the ballots challenged by our campaign. Due to the structure of this challenge review process, it’s highly likely that we will see the vote totals in this recount temporarily go upside down today.
As you are likely aware, because of the way this process has been structured, all of the Franken challenges were considered first and now the board is working their way through the Coleman challenges. Our campaign brought around 1000 challenges before the board. We are in the process of withdrawing approximately 400 of those, and because the board did not have time to pull them out of the line-up before today’s meeting, today you’ll likely see the numbers flip upside down as a significant number of those withdrawals go back into the Franken column. Because of the timing, the withdrawn challenges that will provide additional Coleman votes will not be awarded until later. This will cause a temporary flip today that will be righted once all the ballots have been reviewed and withdrawn challenges reinstated, likely by tomorrow.
We fully and confidently expect that by the time the review process is complete, the vote totals will right themselves, and Senator Coleman will be ahead, as he has been throughout this recount process.
TAB
Thank heavens we have someone like you.