Franken camp withdraws more challenges, says some counties not sorting absentee votes

The Al Franken for Senate campaign said today it is withdrawing approximately 425 more of the ballot challenges its representatives made during Minnesota’s statewide U.S. Senate election recount. Together Franken and his opponent, Republican incumbent U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman, made 1,283 initial withdrawals last week from their combined total of 6,655 challenged ballots.

Franken recount attorney Marc Elias told reporters the campaign would continue reviewing — and if need be, withdrawing — challenged ballots through Dec. 16, when the State Canvassing Board meets to begin a three-day process of tallying the recount. Elias characterized the work of reviewing Franken’s ballot challenges as “trying to narrow the universe.”

Elias expressed concern on three fronts: first, that some unnamed number of counties are refusing to sort rejected absentee ballots as Secretary of State Mark Ritchie instructed. Elias said for now the campaign was hoping the secretary of state’s office could work out any problems with counties that are not yet sorting out a so-called “fifth pile” of absentee ballots that were rejected for a reason other than the four reasons allowed by state law.

Elias said the Franken camp continues to be concerned that so far Minneapolis officials haven’t found 133 lost ballots during the overtime Ritchie granted them after Friday’s recount deadline for counties statewide. He said he took heart, however, from a Ritchie reference over the weekend to what Elias termed longstanding precedent for using the precinct’s existing vote tabulation even if the ballots that would corroborate that count aren’t found.

Elias also devoted several minutes — a significant portion of the 30-minute conference call with reporters from local and national media outlets — asserting that Minneapolis must count 12 other ballots sent from overseas that elections workers discovered while searching for the missing 133 from the city’s now-notorious Precinct 1, Ward 3. He said the city’s own records show there already are 19 such ballots uncounted due to election-judge error and cited precedent in recent days in which officials in Hennepin, Becker, Itasca and Scott counties included legitimately cast ballots discovered after Nov. 4.