U.S. Senate recount: Who will have the final say?

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A number of unanswered questions continue to cloud the ultimate outcome of the U.S. Senate recount in Minnesota. What will become of wrongly rejected absentee ballots? Will 133 lost Minneapolis ballots be included in the recount? How many challenged ballots will remain when the State Canvassing Board begins examining the contested votes early next week? And will the election ultimately be decided by the courts or the U.S. Senate?

Canvassing board will again meet to discuss rejected absentee ballots
By Paul Demko , Minnesota Independent
The five-member statewide canvassing board — charged with overseeing the recount process in the U.S. Senate race — will meet a week from Friday to discuss the fate of absentee ballots that were wrongly rejected by local election officials.

Last week the panel declined to include such ballots in the recount, as urged by Al Franken’s campaign. But the canvassing board left open the possibility of taking action on the disqualified ballots at a subsequent hearing. Earlier this week, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie ordered local election officials to sort rejected absentee ballots into five piles — indicating either the reason that a ballot was disqualified or that there was no legitimate grounds for the vote not being counted. Under Minnesota law there are only four reasons for which a absentee ballot can be rejected.


Al Franken’s campaign continues to claim that it holds a miniscule four-vote lead when all ballots are considered, while counts tabulated by media outlets show Coleman maintaining a 192-vote margin. The difference in these tallies comes from how the roughly 6,600 challenged ballots are treated. The Franken camp’s count includes every single disputed vote, relying on the judgment of the local elections officials in determining which candidate a voter intended to support. The other tallies do not include any of the challenged ballots.

But the number of contested ballots continues to drop by the day now that the manual recount is complete. The Coleman camp announced today that it is withdrawing another 475 challenges, bringing the number of ballots that it’s contesting down to 2,250. Similarly the Franken campaign has been whittling away at its pile of contested ballots, reducing the total to 2,222.

Some clarification on these lingering issues should begin to emerge on Friday when the five-member statewide canvassing board again meets to consider the fate of wrongly rejected absentee ballots. The Franken campaign was initially rebuffed in its effort to have the panel include such votes in the recount, but the five-member board is now set to revisit the issue.

Franken camp withdraws more challenges, says some counties not sorting absentee votes
By Chris Steller , Minnesota Independent
The Al Franken for Senate campaign said today it is withdrawing approximately 425 more of the ballot challenges its representatives made during Minnesota’s statewide U.S. Senate election recount. Together Franken and his opponent, Republican incumbent U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman, made 1,283 initial withdrawals last week from their combined total of 6,655 challenged ballots.

Franken recount attorney Marc Elias told reporters the campaign would continue reviewing — and if need be, withdrawing — challenged ballots through Dec. 16, when the State Canvassing Board meets to begin a three-day process of tallying the recount. Elias characterized the work of reviewing Franken’s ballot challenges as “trying to narrow the universe.”

Elias expressed concern on three fronts: first, that some unnamed number of counties are refusing to sort rejected absentee ballots as Secretary of State Mark Ritchie instructed. Elias said for now the campaign was hoping the secretary of state’s office could work out any problems with counties that are not yet sorting out a so-called “fifth pile” of absentee ballots that were rejected for a reason other than the four reasons allowed by state law.

Elias said the Franken camp continues to be concerned that so far Minneapolis officials haven’t found 133 lost ballots during the overtime Ritchie granted them after Friday’s recount deadline for counties statewide. He said he took heart, however, from a Ritchie reference over the weekend to what Elias termed longstanding precedent for using the precinct’s existing vote tabulation even if the ballots that would corroborate that count aren’t found.

Elias also devoted several minutes — a significant portion of the 30-minute conference call with reporters from local and national media outlets — asserting that Minneapolis must count 12 other ballots sent from overseas that elections workers discovered while searching for the missing 133 from the city’s now-notorious Precinct 1, Ward 3. He said the city’s own records show there already are 19 such ballots uncounted due to election-judge error and cited precedent in recent days in which officials in Hennepin, Becker, Itasca and Scott counties included legitimately cast ballots discovered after Nov. 4.


The secretary of state’s office has directed local elections officials to sort rejected absentee ballots into five piles, indicating either the reason that a vote was disqualified or that there is no proper reason for the ballot not being counted. This procedure would potentially clear the way for such votes to be included in the recount. But some counties — including Ramsey and Washington — have refused to begin the sorting process, arguing that such a step would require a court order. The Franken campaign believes there are close to 1,000 absentee ballots that were wrongly rejected by local elections officials.

The canvassing board is also likely to address the issue of the 133 lost Minneapolis ballots on Friday. The Democrat’s campaign believes that the votes, which were included in the original vote tally, should still be counted. Meanwhile the Coleman camp continues to question whether any ballots have actually disappeared — despite strong evidence to the contrary.

If the Franken campaign doesn’t get its way on these issues the contest looks likely headed to court. While Marc Elias, the Democrat’s lead recount attorney, has continually downplayed this possibility, he made it clear at a press conference today in Washington that litigation remains a possibility. “If voters in Minnesota are disenfranchised, if there are lawful ballots that have not been counted, all options are gonna be on the table,” Elias told reporters. “We’re not gonna walk away from what are hundreds, if not more, lawful votes.”

But there’s also another possible electoral endgame: The Senate could intervene in the process. Competing stories out of the Capitol today come to opposite conclusions on how likely this scenario remains. Roll Call asserts that such an outcome is becoming more probable as the recount drags on, while Politico counters that the defeat of Jim Martin in last week’s Georgia Senate race (and with it, the Democrats’ dream of a veto-proof majority) makes the likelihood of such a scenario remote.

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