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Challenged, lost, rejected ballots: Today's decisions on Coleman/Franken recount

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By Mary Turck, TC Daily Planet
December 12, 2008
As the recount marches on, the Minnesota State Canvassing Board met December 12. Going into the meeting, three kinds of ballots were still contested: the 4000+ ballots challenged by either the Franken or the Coleman campaigns, the 133 "lost" ballots from a Minneapolis precinct, and an unknown number of wrongly-rejected absentee ballots across the state.


MnIndy LiveBlog of the Minnesota State Canvassing Board meeting



MNIndy LiveBlog of Secretary of State Mark Ritchie December 12 press conference



Live coverage from The Uptake



View photos of challenged ballots



Franken campaign video of absentee voters asking that their votes be counted

Challenged ballots: The Canvassing Board strongly urged the two campaigns to review the challenges they have made and withdraw any that are not serious. Campaigns have withdrawn thousands of challenges in the past few days, but the Canvassing Board believes that a large number of frivolous challenges are still pending. The Canvassing Board will begin considering the challenged ballots on Tuesday, December 16.

According to the Minnesota Independent live blog of Secretary of State Mark Ritchie's press conference:

The campaigns have been moving in a positive direction, just not as fast as needed. If a serious challenge takes 2-3 minutes, in four days we could look at 1,000 ballots. The judges and justices said the challenges that merit our time are not in the 4,000 range and probably are below 1,000. This is for the campaigns to hear and take seriously. There are reports that the Franken campaign is going to withdraw more today and that would be great.


Absentee ballots: The Canvassing Board asked counties to immediately proceed with sorting rejected ballots into five piles -- one pile for each of four legal reasons for rejection and a fifth pile for wrongly-rejected ballots -- and then to submit their corrected numbers to the State Canvassing Board.

In a press conference following the Canvassing Board meeting, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie said that most counties are very anxious to proceed with a review of rejected absentee ballots. According to Ritchie, "A huge number of absentee ballots were wrongly rejected. I was first predicting 9 or 10 percent. It’s closer to 13 percent. Counties want to find ways to fix the system so we have fewer errors. No one expects that absentee ballots will go down in number in the future."

Lost ballots: The canvassing board agreed unanimously that the machine total from election night is the best number to use. That total includes the 133 ballots which have been lost. Days of searching have failed to turn up the physical ballots.


Copyright: 
©2008 TC Daily Planet
Mary Turck's picture
Mary Turck

Mary Turck (editor@tcdailyplanet.net) is the editor of the TC Daily Planet.

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Senator Franken

Submitted by Bruce Johnson (not verified) on Fri, 2008-12-12 13:22.

Eric Kleefield at Talking Points memo concludes: Al Franken's chances of winning the Minnesota recount may have just gone up astronomically.
http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/12/franken_gets_big...

It is intriguing that Norm's campaign has been pretty quiet in the last week or so. Do you think there is any relationship to the FBI investigation of him?

Lost ballots were counted but may have never existed

Submitted by Robert Winters (not verified) on Sat, 2008-12-13 19:28.
I have seen ballots double-counted and even triple-counted by scanners where I live (Cambridge, Massachusetts). Depending on how the scanners are configured, it can happen that a ballot will partially jam in a scanner but still be counted and then be kicked out by the machine. A poll worker might then feed the same ballot into the scanner and have it counted a second time. This is not just theoretical. I saw it happen in Cambridge in 1997. Fortunately, after I discovered this problem in Cambridge the machines were configured for future elections to make this double-counting (with poll-worker assistance) very unlikely. It would be helpful to know exactly how the Minnesota scanners were configured for this election, and I would respectfully suggest that this should be done immediately before any decision is finalized regarding whether the total including those phantom ballots is "the better number to use." My instincts tell me that if there are no physical ballots to account for those additional votes, then it would be a major mistake to include them.

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