CQ TODAY ONLINE NEWS
Dec. 10, 2008 – 5:38 a.m.
No End in Sight in Minnesota Senate Recount
By Emily Cadei, CQ Staff
With the hand recount of ballots completed, the Minnesota Senate race is now in the hands of the four men and one woman who comprise the state’s canvassing board.
The board, headed by Democratic Secretary of State Mark Ritchie and rounded out by four state judges, is now responsible for deciding which among the thousands of contested ballots should be included in the count and, potentially, decide the outcome in the race between Republican Sen. Norm Coleman and Democratic challenger Al Franken.
The Minnesota Senate contest is now the lone outstanding race of the 2008 election.
The canvassing board is slated to meet twice in the next week — first on Dec. 12 to consider the matter of incorrectly rejected absentee ballots — and then on Dec. 16 to begin reviewing thousands of ballots challenged by the two campaigns.
Those challenges are not included in the secretary of State’s tally of the recount results, completed Dec. 5, making it difficult to assess who is leading in the race.
The Franken campaign says its own internal recount tally, which includes challenged ballots based on unofficial rulings made by county election judges, shows the Democrat ahead by four votes.
The Coleman campaign has dismissed those calculations, but has not offered its own.
Unofficial election returns from Nov. 4 showed Coleman leading Franken by just 215 votes out of 2.9 million ballots cast, a margin of .007 percent. Minnesota law requires a hand recount in any election for federal or state office in which the margin is less than one-half of 1 percentage point.
The canvassing board meeting Dec. 12 is also likely to include consideration of the 133 ballots that the secretary of State says have gone missing from a Minneapolis precinct. The matter was turned over to the secretary of State’s office after Minneapolis election officials gave up searching for the ballots on Dec. 8.
Ritchie said his office is still reviewing legal advice on how to proceed in this scenario.
“We’ll be looking at precedent in Minnesota law. We’ve asked the attorney general for their position,” he said, adding that he expected the issue to be much simpler to resolve than the review of challenged ballots.
Luke Friedrich, press secretary for the Coleman campaign, contested the assumption that the Minneapolis ballots are in fact missing.
“There are a number of plausible scenarios that could explain this, and we believe the secretary of State and others should fully explore those possibilities rather than simply accepting the political spin of the Franken campaign that the only possible explanation is ‘missing ballots,’ ” Friedrich said. “We continue to review the issue and to review what options are available to address it.”
No End in Sight in Minnesota Senate Recount
The lead attorney for the Franken campaign, Marc Elias, was less equivocal.
“Let me be clear, these people exist, these people voted and these people’s votes must count,” he said.
The Franken campaign supports a solution in which the recount of this Minneapolis precinct reverts back to the election night total. Said Elias: “We are fortunate because we have the fully canvassed and audited results to fall back on.”
The squabbling over Minneapolis’ missing ballots is only the beginning of the Coleman and Franken campaign’s disagreements concerning the next phase in this process, in which the recount results are canvassed.
The Franken campaign has pushed hard for state officials to review and count wrongly rejected absentee votes. The canvassing board ruled last month that it did not have the authority to do so, but is expected to decide Dec. 12 whether the counties should open and count those votes, based on advice it has requested from the state attorney general’s office.
Last week, Ritchie’s office also asked the counties to begin sorting rejected absentee ballots to help determine the number of wrongly rejected votes. The office set a Dec. 18 deadline for this process.
The review, however, is voluntary, and a handful of counties — including Ramsey County, home to the city of St. Paul — have refused to take part, arguing it is the job of the courts to handle any ballot challenges once the recount is complete.
That echoes the position the Coleman campaign has taken on the matter.
Finally, there is the matter of challenged ballots, which the canvassing board must go through and rule on. During the recount the two campaigns challenged a total of 6,655 ballots, due to disagreements with the election judges’ verdicts on whom the vote should go to.
In the past weeks, both sides have withdrawn more than 2,000 of these challenges, and promise to rescind more in the coming days. The secretary of State’s office has set aside four days for the review, and Ritchie is sticking to that timeline. Others, however, have estimated that it could take weeks.
Depending on how the canvassing board proceeds, the election could end up in state court. Neither Franken nor Coleman attorneys have ruled out that option if these canvassing issues are not resolved to their liking.
The U.S. Senate could also end up weighing in — it has the constitutional authority to rule on how its members get elected to the chamber. The matter would go through the Senate Rules Committee.
Republicans in Washington have warned, however, that should the Democratic majority try to throw its weight around on this election, it could spark ugly partisan warfare early on in the 111th Congress.
Comments
THis looks more like Alice in Wonderland as the days go by. Perhaps they should have another election and have the 2 candidates pay for it. 4 votes doesn't make a win in this situation.
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