Feb 3, 2009 9:19 pm US/Central
Judges May Add 5,000 Absentees To Senate RaceST. PAUL (AP) ―



The judges in Minnesota's Senate election trial threw Republican Norm Coleman a lifeline on Tuesday, opening the door to adding nearly 5,000 absentee ballots to a race that Democrat Al Franken leads by just 225 votes.

It wasn't an outright victory for Coleman, who had wanted the judges to look at about 11,000 such ballots. He also has to prove the absentees were unfairly rejected, and it's likely that Franken would gain votes from the pile too.

But his attorneys had said the absentees were the centerpiece of his court challenge, and they cheered the ruling.

"This is a victory for thousands of Minnesotans whose rejected absentee ballots will now be properly reviewed in this election," Coleman attorney Ben Ginsberg said in a prepared statement.

In a separate order later Tuesday, the judges made clear that in order to actually gain votes from rejected absentees, Coleman would have to prove at trial that they were wrongly rejected.

Coleman's lawyers "have raised factual discrepancies that are best resolved in a full evidentiary hearing," the judges wrote in their order denying Coleman's earlier request to have most of those nearly 5,000 ballots opened and counted.

Coleman's attorneys said they're ready to offer individualized evidence that all or most of those 4,800 ballots were wrongly rejected -- strengthening the possibility that the trial could last several months.

While the order limits Coleman's field of potential new votes, it was many more than Franken had hoped. His attorneys had argued Coleman should be limited to about 650 -- the specific figure given in his initial Jan. 6 lawsuit.

But the judges ruled that the Jan. 6 filing laid out additional categories of ballots that should be examined.

The judges said they would look at two categories of rejected absentees: those where it appeared the voter had met the legal requirements, and those where they might have run afoul of the law through no fault of their own.

The judges arrived at 4,797 because that was the number Coleman said in a Jan. 23 filing met one of those two conditions.

Ginsberg said the 4,797 were always "the universe of ballots we thought should be examined because they are valid." He said they never expected the rest to be brought into the count, but "we were willing to bring them here so everyone could see that."

Franken has his own pile of 771 rejected absentees he wants considered, but his lawyers aren't expected to make his argument on those until after Coleman rests his case.

Meanwhile, Franken attorney Marc Elias said, "We're prepared to go forward with the universe they've defined." Elias said he believed the judges would find that most of the 4,797 had been properly rejected.

Coleman's attorneys have already started offering evidence on some of the rejected absentees on the list of 4,797. But it's impossible to say if the judges bought Coleman's arguments on any of those. That probably won't be known until the judges issue a final order in the case.

Ginsberg said the 4,797 rejected absentees now subject to review weren't cherry-picked from areas that favored Coleman. Elias said he was skeptical: "Let's just put it this way -- it was a list compiled by the Coleman campaign," he said.

Meanwhile, in testimony at the trial Tuesday, Coleman's attorneys sought to show that different Minnesota counties applied different standards to rejecting absentees -- the heart of their case in seeking a uniform standard on absentees.

Kevin Corbid, who supervises elections in Washington County, said his county decided on absentees with the best information available at the time.

But Coleman's attorney, Joe Friedberg, highlighted an area where Corbid's decisions appeared to differ slightly from his counterpart in a neighboring county.

Corbid testified he didn't make a special effort to accept previously rejected absentee ballots if he had reason to believe they were rejected because of mistakes by election judges. A day earlier, Ramsey County Elections Manager Joe Mansky testified he made a particular effort to remedy such mistakes.

In their written order Tuesday, the judges signaled they're not receptive to Coleman's argument that apparent differing standards for rejecting absentee ballots in different counties violated federal law set out by the U.S. Supreme Court's Bush v. Gore ruling.

"Unlike the situation presented in Florida in Bush v. Gore, the Minnesota Legislature has enacted a standard clearly and unambiguously enumerating the grounds upon which an absentee ballot may be accepted or rejected," trial judges Elizabeth Hayden, Kurt Marben and Denise Reilly wrote.

http://wcco.com/politics/absentee.ballo ... 25416.html