Coleman-Franken contest heads to trial

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The never-ending U.S. Senate contest will now go to trial. Beginning this afternoon, a three-judge panel will weigh evidence on whether the state Canvassing Board got the vote tally right when it certified Al Franken as the winner by 225 votes. In anticipation of the trial, Norm Coleman’s camp issued a video alleging that the Democrats are seeking to disenfranchise voters. The former senator also hired media consultant Gail Gitcho to help spin the national press, according to The Washington Post. Marc Elias, lead recount attorney for Franken, presented his own spin to reporters on a conference call this morning. Continue Reading

Minneapolis mayor’s race: With Rybak in, Remington’s out and Miller remains as rival

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Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak’s announcement Tuesday that he’ll run for re-election means there’ll be a two-man race for the DFL endorsement, at least according to the other man: Rybak rival Bob Miller.Miller’s prediction was borne out, for now anyway, by City Council Member Ralph Remington, who confirmed he won’t run for mayor now that Rybak’s in the race. (Note: Miller’s calculation doesn’t factor in perennial candidate Dick Franson.)Rybak’s announcement surprised few, Miller included. “I expected nothing less,” he said after learning that Rybak had made it official. ”That was the case back in November.” (Miller announced his own candidacy Nov. 13.)As for the city’s dire financial straits, “it’s going to be pretty pitiful,” said Miller, acknowledging a looming budget gap that would cramp any mayor’s style.But that doesn’t keep Miller from contrasting his approach with Rybak’s.“We have differences on how we think citizens should be involved in their local government, how we would manage the finances of the city, the kinds of initiatives that we would focus on,” he said.Indeed, the crashing economy can put their differences in higher relief. Continue Reading

WSJ recount editorial prompts non-meek response from Judge Cleary

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A much-criticized Jan. 5 Wall Street Journal editorial that called the Minnesota State Canvassing Board “meek,” Secretary of State Mark Ritchie a man of partisan “machinations,” and Al Franken — who the board determined had won 225 more votes in the statewide recount than former U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman — “tainted and undeserving,” has prompted a retort from one of its targets: State Canvassing Board member Edward Cleary. Cleary, assistant chief judge at Ramsey County District Court, identifies himself as a WSJ subscriber of three decades’ standing who doesn’t always agree with the newspaper’s editorials but was particularly disappointed by this one, which he finds “long on partisan tone and short on accurate reporting.”
Read Cleary’s complete letter:
Dear Sirs:
As a subscriber of your newspaper for almost three decades, I don’t expect to always agree with your editorial viewpoint. Yet I am nevertheless very disappointed when I read an editorial long on partisan tone and short on accurate reporting. As a member of the Minnesota State Canvassing Board, appointed pursuant to statute, I have attended all nine Board open meetings held the past seven weeks. Continue Reading

Coleman: Fight to regain seat “not just about me”

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Former U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman vowed today to continue his fight to regain his seat by filing an election contest in Ramsey County District Court. The Republican positioned the legal move as part of an electoral process that he acknowledged is “messy and inconvenient,” but he expressed confidence in the outcome. Franken lawyer: Coleman’s waging an “uphill battle to overturn will of people” By Chris Steller, Minnesota Independent
Democrat Al Franken’s campaign attorney Marc Elias, responding to former U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman’s filing of an election contest today, said the Republican’s legal move “could charitably be called an uphill battle to try to overturn the will of the people.”
Elias dismissed the Coleman suit, which he said alleges mistakes in the recently concluded statewide recount, as being without merit — “essentially the same thin gruel, warmed over leftovers we’ve all been served over the last few weeks.”
Elias took note of one ”new twist” — a Coleman contention that some ballots should be declared invalid because election judges failed to initial them. Otherwise, he dismissed Coleman’s allegations — doubly-counted duplicate ballots, missing ballots, potentially valid but twice-rejected absentee ballots — as old and in some cases disproven news. “When you lose by 225 votes, you have to go mining for votes somewhere,” Elias said, calling the lawsuit’s renewed claims about 133 ballots missing in Minneapolis as the recount equivalent of believing the earth is flat. Continue Reading

Franken ‘ready to go to Washington just as soon as possible’

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Al Franken, calling himself “the next senator from Minnesota,” said Monday afternoon he is ready to go to Washington to get to work just as soon as possible.”

Franken deemed winner of Senate recount, but Coleman will contest in courtBy Paul Demko, Minnesota Independent
Al Franken has emerged from the U.S. Senate recount with a 225-vote lead over incumbent Norm Coleman. The five-member State Canvassing Board unanimously certified the results at a hearing this afternoon. Roughly two months after the election — and following a painstaking statewide manual recount of nearly three-million ballots — Franken received 1,212,431 votes, while Coleman was backed by 1,212,206 voters. While the actions of the canvassing board would seem to suggest that the epic election contest is finally drawing to a close, the Coleman campaign immediately made it clear that they have no intention of conceding defeat. Attorney Tony Trimble announced at a press conference following the canvassing board meeting that they will file a lawsuit contesting the outcome of the contest. Continue Reading

Supreme Court denies Coleman’s suit to stop certification of election

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The Minnesota Supreme Court issued an order late Monday morning (pdf) denying an emergency motion from the Norm Coleman campaign to stop the State Canvassing Board from certifying the vote in the statewide Senate recount. That clears the way for the canvassing board to certify this afternoon that Al Franken received the most votes in the Nov. 4 election as determined by the recount that followed. In its order, the court wrote that “the threshold question before us in this motion is whether disputes over rejected absentee ballots can be resolved in this automatic recount proceeding, or whether they must await an election contest proceeding.”
Only “obvious errors in the counting or recording of the votes” that all sides could agree on, the court said, should be fixed in the recount that the canvassing board will certify today. All other disputes belong in a court action called an election contest that either side may file within seven days of certification. Continue Reading

Franken leading, Coleman suing

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Norm Coleman’s attorneys vowed to go to court to make up the ground Coleman lost today after more than 900 absentee ballots that had been mistakenly rejected were tallied, increasing Al Franken’s lead to 225. “We’ll take whatever legal action … to remedy this artificial lead,” said Coleman recount attorney Fritz Knaak. var mnindyHeadline = “MORE FROM”; var mnindyHeadline2 = “Michigan Messenger”; “We’ve had better days,” Knaak conceded, admitting that “the numbers are what they are.” But he repeated that the “process was broken” and predicted that “the election will still be called in Coleman’s favor.”
That will happen, Coleman attorney Tony Trimble said, when hundreds of absentee ballots that the campaign still wants reviewed are opened and counted. “We’re still trying to ferret out for counting these 600 ballots,” he said. Secretary of State Mark Ritchie said he expected that the State Canvassing Board would declare a result of the election on Monday. Continue Reading

Supreme Court asks to hear from Franken, counties before ruling on Coleman’s suit

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The Minnesota Supreme Court ordered (pdf) Friday afternoon that the campaign of Al Franken respond by 9 a.m. Saturday to U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman’s Dec. 31 petition to start over on the current court-ordered effort to count wrongfully rejected absentee ballots. The justices also directed seven Minnesota counties to tell the court whether they reviewed additional rejected absentee ballots the rival campaigns want counted — and if not, why. (In regional meetings this week, Sherburne County officials, for example, refused to consider three additional ballots the Coleman campaign asked them to review.)var mnindyHeadline = “MORE FROM”; var mnindyHeadline2 = “Michigan Messenger”; The court’s order left open the possibility of calling for oral arguments as it considers Coleman’s petition. It also made it clear that the justices won’t have new instructions for the State Canvassing Board before the Secretary of State’s staff starts opening and counting absentee ballots from around the state on Saturday morning. Continue Reading

Blow by blow, ballot by ballot

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The Daily Kos writes that the “smell of desperation is approaching lutefisk levels in MN. (EPA warning for elevated levels of airborne toxins).” The Strib reports that the Coleman camp rejected 59 of 60 absentee ballots that elections officials in St. Louis County said should be counted. Among those rejected by the Coleman reps was election judge Shirley Graham, who voted absentee because she is an election judge in a precinct other than her own. Continue Reading

North by northwest of Twin Cities, review of uncounted absentee ballots is hit or miss

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Two of the first in a series of a dozen regional meetings that started today in Minnesota’s Senate election recount adjourned this morning after only an hour — with very different results. In Sherburne County, representatives of the campaigns of Al Franken and U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman agreed to forward to the State Canvassing Board 15 of 18 unopened absentee ballots that local election officials decided last week had been wrongly rejected. But next door in Anoka County the process prescribed by order of the state Supreme Court quickly collapsed, with the rival campaigns at loggerheads over the Coleman representative’s insistence on including ballots that local officials had not selected as having been wrongly rejected. Coleman’s camp wanted to add about 10 ballots to the 35 that Anoka County Elections Department had identified as belonging in the so-called “fifth pile” of unopened absentee ballots, Anoka Elections Supervisor Rachel Smith said. Franken’s forces rejected that move. Continue Reading