Another moving piece to the U.S. Senate race
The Minnesota Supreme Court on Wednesday (Dec. 17) afternoon will hear oral arguments pertaining to rejected absentee ballots in the U.S. Senate race.
Today’s (Dec. 15) court order was in response to a petition filed by the Coleman for Senate Campaign with the court in which the campaign asked the court, among other things, to order local election officials to take no additional action relating to rejected absentee ballots until further ordered by the court.
Although setting a date for oral arguments and taking other actions, the court did not order that local election officials stop reexamining the controversial rejected absentee ballots.
The State Canvassing Board last Friday requested that local election officials do reexamine rejected absentee ballots.
The Secretary of State’s Office has estimated that as many as 1500 of these ballots statewide may have been wrongly rejected.
The Coleman campaign expressed satisfaction over today’s court order.
“The scheduling of a hearing by the Supreme Court on Wednesday effectively ensures that our concerns about the uniform treatment of rejected ballots will be heard,” said Fritz Knaak, Senior Counsel for Coleman for Senate., in a press release.
“The fact is, without a clear directive from the Supreme Court, there could be more than 130 different standards being applied to rejected absentee ballots being placed into the so-called ‘fifth pile,’” he said.
There needs to be solid, nonsubjective guidelines for sorting the rejected absentee ballots., Knaak has argued.
Late this afternoon Franken for Senate lead recount attorney Marc Elias offered a measured appraisal of the court order.
There is nothing in it to prevent local election officials from going ahead in the interim “with enfranchising these voters,” he said.
That is, the resorting of rejected absentee ballots could continue.
“I don’t think they (Minnesota Supreme Court) have any reason to stop local elected officials from counting (the ballots),” said Elias.
“Why would the Supreme Court of Minnesota prevent lawful ballots from being counted?” he asked.
According to the Franken campaign, Hennepin County has directed its election officials to begin reexamining rejected absentee ballots for errors.
Despite the moving pieces of the U.S. Senate recount, Elias argued that things haven’t fundamentally changed.
“What I would say is where we are now is essentially where we’ve been from the beginning,” he said.
The Franken Campaign is about enfranchising voters; the Coleman campaign about disenfranchise voters, he opined.
Both the Coleman and Franken campaigns have significantly reduced the number of challenged ballots that the state canvassing board must scrutinize.
The canvassing board is scheduled to meet Tuesday (Dec. 16) at noon in the State Office Building in St. Paul to resume its canvas.
