Thread: Minnesota officials eye challenged Senate ballots

Minnesota officials eye challenged Senate ballots
Posted: 05:30 PM ET

From CNN All Platform Journalist Chris Welch

ST. PAUL, Minnesota (CNN) — While the official hand recount in Minnesota's tight U.S. Senate race between incumbent Republican Norm Coleman and Democrat Al Franken has ended, a stack of about 1,500 challenged ballots means the announcement of a winner is still at least a few days away.

Secretary of State Mark Ritchie's canvassing board, which includes Ritchie, two state Supreme Court judges and two Ramsey County judges, began reviewing the questioned ballots at noon Tuesday in an effort to determine each voter's intent.


Ballots have been challenged — and rejected — for a number of reasons, many because of ovals not properly filled in, some because of identifying marks — initials or signatures — made by voters on their ballots, and others for stray markings, particularly in the areas with the candidates' names.

The board started with about 440 ballots disputed by the Franken campaign. After three and half hours of debate, the board had sifted through just over 100 of them.

As could be expected with ballots challenged by Franken, most of the votes so far have been awarded to Coleman — approximately 70 to Franken's dozen or so. The remainder of the ballots have been placed in an "other" pile, most of them rejected as a vote for either candidate for one reason or another.

Ritchie hopes to complete the review of challenged ballots by the end of the day Friday, though that deadline is not solid. It is also possible for campaigns to add still more challenges to their piles.

At the end of the recount, Coleman held a slight edge of about 200 votes, but that number is far from final.

Filed under: Al Franken • Minnesota • Norm Coleman

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/20 ... e-ballots/

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Dixie

Al Franken, would you just go AWAY!

I was watching Sean Hanity a couple weeks ago and he was trashing Franken ( well deserved ) . He referred to him as Stewert Small , said
he was a failed comedian , a failed talk show host and was going to be a failed Senator . Funny as hell .

Minnesota Supreme Court weighs Senate absentees
Updated: 1 hr ago

ST. PAUL, Minn. -- In the best of worlds all valid absentee ballots would be counted in Minnesota's disputed US Senate election. But Senator Norm Coleman's attorney told the Minnesota Supreme Court Wednesday afternoon local election boards lack the power to resurrect wrongfully rejected ballots.

"Even with the best of intentions, this could become Florida 2008," attorney Roger Magnuson told the high court, saying a move to add new ballots never counted on Election Day would undo 150 years worth of election history in the state.

Magnuson was involved in the disputed presidential election in 2000, but the Florida remark caused him to get off on the wrong foot with Justice Paul Anderson. The justice quickly admonished him to avoid such comparisions.

"I know you've been there and were involved but this is not Florida," Anderson remarked, "I'm just not terribly receptive to you telling us that we're going to Florida and we're comparing to that; this is Minnesota, we've got a case in Minnesota and let's argue Minnesota."

Chief Justice Paul Magnuson and Associate Justice Barry Anderson excused themselves from the court's procedings because they sit on the state canvassing board, which continues to review hundreds of ballots challenged by the campaigns during the statewide recount.

The Secretary of State's staff estimated last week that more than 1,500 of the absentee ballots rejected on Election Day were disqualified wrongly, due to mistakes by local election officials. Democrat Al Franken has pushed adding those ballots, which were never counted, back into the mix before the canvassing board certifies a winner.

The state Canvassing Board encouraged local election boards to sift through the thousands of rejected absentee ballot packets they have in their possession, and determine which ones were thrown out or disqualified due to administrative errors. That prompted the lawsuit from the Coleman camp, which said it could result in a "crazy quilt" pattern of local responses.

Coleman's attorney Roger Magnuson said discrepancies over absentee ballots should be ruled on by a court in a "election contest," which is a civil suit filed after a winner is declared. Even if local election officials, who currently have possession of those rejected absentees, wanted to sort through them and count them the Coleman campaign argues there are no uniform guidelines in place for all 87 counties to follow.

Franken's attorney Bill Pentelovitch told the court that the power to right "obvious errors" rests with those local election boards, who can submit amended election returns to the state after the fact. He said the thrust of previous court decisions was that every effort should be made to count valid ballots, and that individual votes shouldn't be forced into the court system to have their votes count.

Justice Helen Meyer at one point asked if county boards are free to act, and change their returns until such time the state's board has certified a winner.

"What would prevent a county board from correcting an earlier report, by filing an amended report?" she asked, "And it's separate from the recount process altogether."

But Justice Lori Gildea told Franken's attorney that her state statutes make it clear to her that only those absentee ballots that qualified on Election Day can be opened and submitted.

"The legislature has defined the universe to be counted as ACCEPTED absentee ballots only," Gildea said, "So what I'm wondering then why would we look at whether or not an absentee ballot was properly rejected?"

Franken's legal team maintains that improperly rejecting a ballot constitutes an "obvious error" for purposes of righting wrongs. Justice Paul Anderson wondered aloud just what the "outer limits of obvious error" should be when it comes to deciding this case.

Both Coleman's litigator, Roger Magnuson, and Justice Gildea said the law limits the role of canvassing boards to double checking for "errors in tabulating" and mistakes in "recording" the vote totals.

Gildea also quizzed Pentelovitch over what she saw as an apparent change in Secretary of State Mark Ritchie's rules for the recount. She pointed out that the Secretary of State's recount guidebook, published before the election, noted that rejected absentee ballots should not be part of the statewide manual recount process.

But Attorney General Lori Swanson disputed that notion, arguing that the Secretary of State's office has not changed the rules of the game when it comes to rejected absentees. Those ballots were not part of the statewide recount, she noted.

The question at hand, Swanson asserted, is whether those wrongfully rejected ballots can become part of the canvassing effort, which is a separate process. Canvassing happens in all races, whether there's a recount or not.

The court took the case under advisement, after asking if there's any legal or constitutional deadline to declare a winner. They were told that, unlike the 2000 presidential election, there is none.

By John Croman, KARE 11 News
http://www.kare11.com/news/elections/el ... &catid=222