U.S. Senate recount: Back to the battle over rejected absentee ballots

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Wednesday morning the five-member statewide canvassing board will meet to discuss the fate of absentee ballots that were rejected by local election officials. Al Franken’s campaign believes that information about those ballots should be scrutinized to determine if they were properly invalidated. Norm Coleman’s campaign has argued that inspecting such ballots is outside the purview of the statewide recount currently underway. Today the Franken camp provided some insight into how many contested ballots might be at stake in that decision. According to Marc Elias, the Democrat’s lead recount attorney, they have so far received information on rejected absentee ballots from all or part of 66 counties. Continue Reading

Coleman/Franken recount: November 26

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The State Canvassing Board will NOT count or recount absentee ballots that were rejected at the precinct level. Anyone taking bets on whether there will be a lawsuit from whichever candidate loses the recount?Counting down to the end of the recount, we have 86.04 percent of votes recounted and 4,740 votes challenged by Franken and Coleman. No result will be final until the State Canvassing Board decides on the challenged ballots. Below: the latest recount details (November 26) and links to more recount news than you want to read. November 26 recount results, 8 p.m.
Precincts Recounted: 89.64% (3,702 of 4,130)Percentage of Ballots Recounted = 80.62%
November 4 votes from these precincts were 1,046,101 for Coleman and 1,042,208 for Franken. Continue Reading

VOICES | A Somali Perspective: Brian Coyle Center Controversy

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As America celebrates President-Elect Barack Obama’s historic win, the Somali community in Minnesota is forced to deal with negative press brought about by one of their own. On Election Day, November 4th, stories about Somali volunteers allegedly influencing voters at the polling stations began to appear in the press. Shortly after polls opened at Brian Coyle Center, a precinct inhabited mostly by Somalis, GOP challengers alleged that some voters were instructed to vote for Al Franken by translators. However, two news stories, one by Mshale, and another by the Minnesota Independent reported that witnesses claimed that a translator at the center was instructing people to vote for Coleman. Following these reports, Omar Jamal, a self-described community leader, accused the Somali Action Alliance, a non-partisan grassroots organization, and its volunteers, for pointing voters towards Al Franken. Continue Reading

Judge rules in Franken’s favor over ballot access

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Ramsey County Judge Dale Lindman ruled that Al Franken’s campaign can gain access to information on voters whose ballots were rejected. This morning Lindman heard nearly an hour of arguments over the issue, and this afternoon he ordered Ramsey County election officials to hand over the data by the close of business Wednesday. “With each passing hour, the Franken campaign is irreparably harmed in its efforts to ensure that each valid vote is properly counted and to prepare for the procedures that will decide this election,” Lindman wrote in his order, which applies only to Ramsey County. Franken is seeking data from all 87 of the state’s counties to see if rejected votes were done so properly. Fourteen counties have already turned over the data, but Ramsey was a holdout. Continue Reading

Somali voters at Brian Coyle Center: Claims, clans, controversies

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A mixture of first-time voters, translators, competing community leaders, political issues in Somalia, and clan-based allegiances in the Minnesota Somali community boiled over at the Brian Coyle Center on Election Day.The controversy began November 5, when Omar Jamal held a press conference in which he asserted that translators were telling Somali elderly men and women to vote for Democratic Senate candidate Al Franken. Jamal, a self-proclaimed leader of the Somali community, is executive director of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center in St. Paul. On Election Day, translators had told me that Mohamud Wardere, a staffer in Republican Senator Norm Coleman’s office, was influencing voters. On November 5, KSTP reported “[Jamal] said that at the polling place set up inside the Brian Coyle Community Center in south Minneapolis, Coleman and Franken workers tried to illegally influence a ‘few dozen’ Somali voters.” Continue Reading

Coleman up by 215 — more to come

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The last of the last vote audits raised Coleman’s lead to 215 votes. Just to recap: his lead started with 700+ votes on election night, then fell gradually to a low of 204 votes on Saturday, and is now at 215. The count re-sets to zero-zero tomorrow, when the recount begins. Secretary of State Mark Ritchie promises updates every night of the recount, and we’ll be reporting those — along with all the charges, counter-charges and lawsuits. Recount, audit, canvass — what’s it all about? Continue Reading

Red Lake has a knack for mattering in recount-tight races

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Braublog notes that the purgers at President Bush’s U.S. Department of Justice may have been onto something when they targeted former U.S. Attorney Tom Heffelfinger for working to advance voting rights for Native Americans; turnout continues to climb to new heights at the Red Lake Indian Reservation, running 95 percent in favor of Democrat Al Franken on Election Day, the Bemidji Pioneer reports today. There’s nothing new about the northern Minnesota reservation getting attention during tight election contests. As reported here last month, the director of President Ronald Reagan’s 1984 re-election campaign is fond of recalling how he had to talk down hard-charging colleagues who wanted to recount what they thought were suspicious votes there (by “dead Indians”) in hopes of netting the Gipper a full 50-state sweep. And Red Lake has had experience with close races and calls for recounts in tribal government elections as recently as 2006. The area has found a way to play a leading role even in the preliminaries to this week’s recount in the U.S. Senate election. Continue Reading

‘Ordinary voter’ in New York Times recount story has strong GOP ties

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A man presented as an “ordinary voter” in a New York Times article about the impending recount in Minnesota’s U.S. Senate race has strong ties to the Republican Party and conservative causes that the article does not reveal. Media Matters on NYT’s Franken/Coleman story
Media watchdog group Media Matters is calling reporting on the recount of Minnesota’s U.S. Senate race “woeful.” Written by Christina Cappecchi, who also writes for MinnPost, the piece concludes “with right-wing talk points presented by right-wing talking heads,” according to MM’s Eric Boehlert. The reporter quotes or notes six supporters of Norm Coleman, while only referring to one supporter of Al Franken. Cappechi also quotes Sean Hannity, who muffed some key facts in a recent appearance with Tim Pawlenty, as stating there’s “fishy business” surrounding the Nov. 4 election and vote counting. Continue Reading

Franken closes gap to 204 votes

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UPDATED 6 p.m., 11/15/08 • Senator Norm Coleman’s lead over Al Franken shrunk again from 206 to 204 votes after counties from all over Minnesota turned in their audits Friday. The hand count audits were only of 3 to 5 precincts in any given county and are done after every election in Minnesota to check the accuracy of the voting machines. Correction from The Uptake: We’ve discovered an error in the math and had to revise the totals. It’s now a 204 vote difference. The story originally reported that the difference had shrunk to 200. Continue Reading