***MN Supreme Court rejects Colemans' suit. Canvassing Board Certifies Result

Coleman dealt another setback as recount nears end

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/M/MINNESOTA_SENATE?SITE=NYMID&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) -- The Minnesota Supreme Court on Monday rejected Republican Norm Coleman's request to count an additional 654 rejected absentee ballots in his weeks-old Senate showdown with Democrat Al Franken. The ruling clears the way for the state Canvassing Board to certify results showing Franken the winner after the Supreme Court said the issue is best settled in a post-count lawsuit.

Coleman's attorneys have said they're likely to sue if he loses the recount, meaning it could be weeks more before the outcome is final.

"Today's ruling, which effectively disregards the votes of hundreds of Minnesotans, ensures that an election contest is now inevitable," Coleman attorney Fritz Knaak said in a written statement. "The Coleman campaign has consistently and continually fought to have every validly cast vote counted, and for the integrity of Minnesota's election system, we will not stop now."

Coleman has argued the ballots were improperly rejected. Franken's campaign said Coleman was focusing only on ballots that would allow him to prevail.

Franken, the former "Saturday Night Live" personality who has been active in Democratic politics for years, leads Coleman by 225 votes. That's after the state counted more than 2.9 million ballots, including 900 absentees not counted on Nov. 4 because of poll worker errors.

"Minnesotans have waited a long time for a winner to be declared in this race, and today, with the last attempt to halt the counting process now having failed, Al Franken will be declared the winner," said Franken attorney Marc Elias.

The state Supreme Court cited an earlier order requiring candidates and local election officials to agree on which unopened absentee ballots should be included in the recount. Justice Alan Page said the ballots Coleman identified didn't have that consensus.

The ruling was another hard blow to Coleman, who entered the weekslong recount up by 215 votes.

Marc Ambinder

http://marcambinder.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/01/minnesotas_canvassing_board_is.php

Minnesota's canvassing board is set to certify comedian Al Franken as the winner of the Senate race by 225 votes, or less than one-one thousandth of a percent.

The Secretary of State, a Democrat, will announce that he's going to certify the race.

At that point, Republican incumbent Norm Coleman's lawyers will have seven days to file an official election contest.

The adjudication of the contest would be decided by three judges appointed by the state's chief justice,

Does Coleman have a case, or is he simply spitting out sour milk?

The answer, as is almost always the case in election disputes, is that one's perspective fixes the law more than the law fixes one's perspective. Casting a ballot and having it counted accurately seems to be simple, but humans have found ways to inject Heisenberg-scale uncertainties into the process.

Coleman's contest will rest on the claim that the state canvassing board violated election law when it came to precincts where duplicated ballots -- those given to voters whose original ballots were damaged -- were included in the tally along with the original, damanged ballots. That seems suspect, right? But the board's response is that they did their best not to include duplicates in the tally.

And the remedy would be... what, exactly? Discarding ballots that are unmarked duplicates would almost certainly disenfranchise voters -- maybe -- depending upon the external reality of the vote count, which is unknowable -- it would take away more voters from legitimate voters than it would take away second, duplicative voters. Franken's campaign contends that there's no reason to assume that just because, in certain precincts, the number of ballots exceeds the number of people who signed up to vote there, the culprit is duplicate voting and the remedy would be to discard all ballots that can't be matched. In cases where the precinct tallies exceed the voter role tallies, the election contest board will most likely investigate, and this will take time...perhaps more than a month.