Al Franken (Photo: Aaron Landry) and Norm Coleman (Photo: WDCpix.com)
UPDATE: Judge Lindman has ruled in Franken’s favor.
The fight over the closest Senate contest in Minnesota history turned to the Ramsey County Courthouse this morning.
In a hearing before Judge Dale Lindman, Al Franken’s campaign argued that Ramsey County election officials should be required to turn over information about rejected absentee ballots. Attorney David Lillehaug made the case that the names of all voters who had their ballots invalidated, along with the reason for that decision, should be provided.
“That information is critical to the plaintiff,” he stated
Although Norm Coleman’s campaign is not a party in the lawsuit, that didn’t stop his legal team from weighing in on the matter. Attorney Fritiz Knaak countered that Ramsey County rightfully determined that such data is private under state law. “Our paramount concern really throughout the process has been ballot security,” Knaak said.
Although Judge Lindman did not immediately issue a ruling on the matter, he indicated that one would be forthcoming by the end of the day. Lindman seemed inclined to favor the Franken campaign’s legal reasoning, aggressively questioning assistant Ramsey County attorney Darwin Lookingbill on why the envelopes containing the invalidated ballots shouldn’t be public data. “Shouldn’t they be entitled to look at the envelope?” he asked at one point.
The Franken campaign has requested information from all 87 counties in order to discern whether ballots were improperly rejected. On Monday it issued a legal brief highlighting four cases where it believes voters were wrongly disenfranchised. Despite the Coleman team’s legal stance, it has made an identical request of local election officials. According to Knaak, only 14 jurisdictions have so far complied and two of them subsequently expressed misgivings about providing the data.
Even if the Franken campaign prevails on the public records issue, it likely faces an uphill battle in convincing the statewide canvassing board to examine the purged ballots. In a ruling issued yesterday, the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office indicated that it believes those ballots should not be considered in the statewide manual recount that got underway this morning.
Whatever the outcome of the current legal dispute, it seems unlikely that this will prove to be the final visit to a courtroom by the dueling campaigns.
Photos: Al Franken, courtesy of Aaron Landry. Norm Coleman via WDCpix.com
4 Comments »
Comment posted November 19, 2008 @ 12:27 pm
Where is the AG opinion published? This is the first I’ve heard of it. I thought most of the case law was in favor of counting all casted ballots and having a higher authority than an election clerk review rejected absentee ballots.
Comment posted November 19, 2008 @ 12:44 pm
Note that the AG opinion does NOT say that the Franken campaign cannot ask for the ballots, or that they cannot be reconsidered per se, just that they cannot be considered in the recount. In other words, the recount can only consider the non-rejected ballots. The Franken campaign can ask for information about the rejected ballots (whether they must receive it is unknown) as part of an attempt to prosecute a challenge to the election on the basis of irregularities. Then this information would be necessary as evidence. So, the AG only said that the information should not be made public or otherwise pursued as part of the recount. It did not weigh in on the issue of providing the information to the campaign in an effort to determine if there was a basis for challenging the election because of irregularities.
Comment posted November 19, 2008 @ 5:02 pm
Your update is wrong: “UPDATE: Judge Lindman has ruled in Coleman’s favor..”
Rather, the judge ruled in Franken’s favor, as your website correctly reports elsewhere.
Comment posted November 19, 2008 @ 5:21 pm
That is correct. My error, dangit.
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