U.S. Senate recount: The politics of perception

We won. We won. We won. If Norm Coleman’s campaign repeats this mantra often enough, perhaps it will actually come true.  At least that seems to be the reasoning of the senator’s political camp.

“We think we’re three for three right now,” Fritz Knaak, the lead attorney for the Republican, told reporters just moments after a statewide canvassing board officially initiated a recount in the closest U.S. Senate race in Minnesota history. “He’s got more votes than the other side. That’s how it works in our system.”

Unfortunately for the Coleman campaign, nobody informed Secretary of State Mark Ritchie of this development.

“Candidates can say anything,” Ritchie noted. “Minnesota law is very clear that any election within a half a percent is not known until the completion of the recount.”

So despite the repeated assertions of victory by the Coleman campaign, Wednesday morning at 8 a.m. the process of manually inspecting 2.9 million ballots will begin at locations across the state. The arduous task is expected to be completed by December 5. The incumbent currently leads by just 215 votes.

But the imminent beginning of the recount will apparently do little to stem the political rhetoric flying back and forth between the Coleman and Franken forces. Minutes after Knaak made his latest “Mission Accomplished” declaration, the Democrats held their own press conference.

Communications director Andy Barr (pictured), naturally, disputed the Coleman camp’s assertion of victory.

“The only person who has named Norm Coleman the winner of anything is Norm Coleman,” he noted. “He had not won this election the first time he declared victory. He had not won this election the second time he declared victory. And as I stand here before you, dealing once again with the phony talking point that will not die: Norm Coleman still has not won this election.”

The manual inspection of ballots is not the only front in the election fight that will see action tomorrow. A lawsuit filed by the Franken campaign — seeking to force local election officials to disclose information on absentee ballots that were invalidated — will get its first hearing tomorrow morning in Ramsey County District Court.

The Democrats are also seeking to have the canvassing board inspect the rejected absentee ballots. In a brief filed with the five-member panel yesterday, the Franken campaign highlighted four cases of voters whose ballots it believes were wrongly invalidated. But the canvassing board punted on the decision for now, wanting more time to study the issue.

Mark Ritchie denied that the legal wrangling and heated rhetoric will delay the recount from moving forward. “Absolutely not,” he said, asserting that the five-member panel is in accord on this issue. “Every person who spoke said out loud that the recount will go forward.”