Minnesota Democratic Senate candidate Al Franken is stepping up his public relations campaign in advance of a pivotal election hearing being held by the state’s canvassing board Friday as part of the effort to determine a winner in the hotly-contested Senate race between Franken and Republican Sen. Norm Coleman .

The race was the closest Senate race in the country this year and the lone outstanding contest of 2008.

Franken staff launched a web video yesterday featuring voters whose absentee ballots were rejected — they say incorrectly — and filed a legal brief with the state’s canvassing board listing information on 62 such voters, all as part of a push to ensure wrongly rejected absentee ballots are included in the certified recount totals.

The canvassing board is responsible for certifying the state’s election totals, which requires reviewing all the county vote counts.

The recount, which was completed Dec. 5, was triggered after a tally of 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 has already ruled that it does not have the authority to sort and count wrongly rejected absentee ballots. It is meeting to determine whether the state’s 87 counties are legally obligated to count these votes, or whether it is best left to the courts.

Legal challenges are likely either way the board rules, as neither campaign has ruled out going to court if the outcome is not to its liking.

The Franken campaign and its attorneys have been arguing since the recount began last month that there are absentee votes that were rejected improperly and that they should be counted. Aides estimate there could be more than 1,000 wrongly rejected ballots.

Franken’s attorneys successfully sued Ramsey County, home of the city of St. Paul, to force the counties to reveal data on rejected absentee ballots in November. That data helped them reach out to voters whose votes were turned away, a handful of whom are featured lamenting their disenfranchisement in the video.

The Franken video, entitled “My Vote,” opens in silence, a somber black background highlighting white text that reads, “In the closest Senate race in Minnesota history, every vote should be counted fairly. But there are Minnesotans who had their votes thrown out, even though they did nothing wrong.

“We’ve made this video because these mistakes don’t just affect votes, they affect people,” said Franken spokesman Andy Barr.

“We expect the state canvassing board will not compound those mistakes by refusing to fix them when they have the chance,” he said.

Republicans, were, predictably, unimpressed with this latest escalation in the two campaign’s media war.