Senator Norm Coleman got a double dose of bad new today.
The State Canvassing Board certified that Al Franken won the Minnesota Senate election by a 225 vote margin. “Senator Al Franken”…I like the sound of it!
Even so, the Certificate of Election must await the conclusion of any election challenge. And Coleman will probably launch an election challenge.
The Board Certification came on the heels of a Minnesota Supreme Court decision that dealt Coleman another “job-security” setback. They denied his motion to reconsider 654 absentee ballots that had been rejected by state canvassing boards—twice. The decision was signed by (a hero from my youth, former Minnesota Viking defensive tackle turned Associate Supreme Court Justice) Alan Page. It points out that their original Supreme Court order required unanimous agreement by the campaigns, the county Canvassing Boards, and the state Canvassing Board for an improperly rejected absentee envelope to be opened and the ballot potentially tallied in the recount. (That previous decision was a lousy one—the counties should have been the only authority on whether absentee ballots were validly submitted.) The Supreme Court, essentially, told Coleman to file an election challenge.
Coleman lawyer Fritz Knaak responded to the court decision:
Given our campaign’s unwavering commitment to ensuring that the vote of no Minnesotan is disenfranchised, today’s ruling by the Minnesota Supreme Court is both disappointing and disheartening.
[…]
The Coleman campaign has consistently and continually fought to have every validly cast vote counted, and for the integrity of Minnesota’s election system, we will not stop now.
“Unwavering?” “Consistently and continually fought?” This statement amounts to a flat-out lie. Late last year, the county elections officials had identified a statewide pool of 1,346 absentee ballots that had been improperly rejected on election day. These are the ballots that the elections officials decided were, in fact, properly cast (the ballots were still sealed in an envelope) and mistakenly rejected.
The Franken campaign asked the Coleman campaign to accept the entire statewide pool of 1,346 ballots. The Coleman campaign declined. Instead, something of a tit-for-tat game ensued in which only 933 absentees were added back into the ballot pool. If Coleman wanted every legitimate vote to count, he would have accepted the decisions of the local election officials on what was and what was not a properly cast absentee ballot. Coleman has disenfranchised 413 voters.
Frankly, I welcome the election contest. It means that those improperly rejected ballots will most likely be counted. Minnesota election law (203B.12 Subd 2) offers four reasons to reject an absentee ballot:
- The wrong voter name or address on the return envelope
- The voter’s signature on the return envelope is not the genuine signature of the individual who applied
- The voter is not registered and eligible to vote and has not included a properly
completed application for registration
- The voter has already voted in the election
This seems pretty straightforward. By Minnesota law, “there is no other reason for rejecting an absentee ballot.”
The Coleman campaign has identified their own pool of ballots (largely from Republican-leaning parts of the state) that local election officials rejected (twice) as improperly cast, but that the campaign believes were properly cast. Most (or all) of them were rejected because of a signature mismatch. Of course the Franken folks will likely identify a similar-sized pool of signature-mismatch ballots from Democratic-leaning parts of the state. The result will be a wash, and perhaps a slight advantage to Franken. (The extremes of voters—poorest, least literate, non-native English speaking, etc.—tend to vote Democratic.)
The whole thing is unlikely to work in Coleman’s favor.
In related news…the Minnesota media are now asking the really hard questions: Minnesota Public Radio asks, “Where’s Al?”, and MinnPost asks “Is there or isn’t there a Norm Coleman Senate office?”
You know…somebody should invent some kind of independent “informational source” that can keep in contact with and report on people involved in these important issues….