The Al Franken for Senate campaign announced today it is suing Ramsey County in hopes that a favorable court ruling will compel all Minnesota counties to release the names of voters whose absentee ballots were rejected in last week’s election. Attorney Marc Elias said the campaign may present cases of wrongly rejected absentee ballots to the newly-formed canvassing board that will oversee the recount in the U.S. Senate race between Franken and U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman.

Elias told a news conference this morning of the case in Beltrami County (where officials have already provided the names Franken seeks) in which an elderly woman’s absentee ballot was rejected because her current stroke-impaired signature didn’t match the signature on file.

Pressed for more examples, Elias and campaign spokesman Andy Barr declined, refusing even to enumerate how many such cases it had learned of, responding that learning about more such cases was the point of the lawsuit.

Another reason counties reject absentee ballots is improper witnessing, Elias noted — a point confirmed by Beth Fraser, director of government affairs at the Minnesota Secretary of State’s office, who also said in an interview with the Minnesota Independent that late-arriving absentee ballots get rejected.

UPDATE: Barr tells Minnesota Public Radio that the Franken campaign had gotten the Beltrami County story wrong and the unnamed woman’s absentee ballot had been rejected for improper witnessing, not a signature mismatch.

Only about a dozen counties have so far complied with the Franken campaign’s data requests, Elias said. Among the counties denying Franken the names are Minnesota’s largest, Hennepin and Ramsey in the Twin Cities. Elias said the campaign had learned from officials at unspecified counties that the Coleman campaign was also seeking the data, and he invited Coleman to join the suit. If the counties don’t comply, Elias said further legal action could follow.

Here’s video from today’s press conference at Franken campaign headquarters in St. Paul. It begins with spokesman Barr summing up a series of debunked reports about the vote count, followed by attorney Elias’ description of an improperly rejected absentee ballot and the campaign’s lawsuit to learn whose absentee ballots were rejected.