Liveblog: Secretary of State Ritchie’s press conference

Following Friday morning’s meeting of the Minnesota State Canvassing Board, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie answered questions from reporters about the ongoing statewide recount. Here are excerpts from the press conference.How confident are you that counties will sort and count as instructed today?

Ritchie: Most counties are very anxious to proceed. A huge number of absentee ballots were wrongly rejected. I was first predicting 9 or 10 percent. It’s closer to 13 percent. Counties want to find ways to fix the system so we have fewer errors. No one expects that absentee ballots will go down in number in the future.

Q: (About the goals of today’s meeting)

Ritchie: Accuracy and transparency are our top priorities. But with respect for the judges’ time who are on the board. On top of the democratic principle that all votes are counted. It was sobering to find that the number of wrongly rejected absentee ballots was between 1,000 and 2,000.

Q. How confident are you that the maximum number of wrongly rejected ballots will come before you?

Ritchie: Our biggest job is the 4,000-some challenged ballots. Getting through those so we get to the challenges that have merit.

Q. Are campaigns playing games?

Ritchie: The campaigns have been moving in a positive direction, just not as fast as needed. If a serious challenge takes 2-3 minutes, in four days we could look at 1,000 ballots. The judges and justices said the challenges that merit our time are not in the 4,000 range and probably are below 1,000. This is for the campaigns to hear and take seriously. There are reports that the Franken campaign is going to withdraw more today and that would be great.

Q. What is the drop dead deadline? Friday afternoon?

Ritchie: When we sign the certificate. The local officials want to make the corrections, the obvious errors.

Q. What kind of correspondence to counties that haven’t responded?

Ritchie: Same to all.

Q. Clarify motion from meeting

Ritchie: Authorize them to open their reports and correct errors.

Q. How will amended totals work into the recounting?

Ritchie: They’d have to give us the full information about changes made. We will cross that bridge when we get there, when the canvassing board receives an amended report. Then we’ll create a procedure to incorporate the corrections.

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Q. How exactly work in amended reports?

Ritchie: Don’t know yet. Colleagues on board had a strong reluctance to say now how we will do this. … I’ve heard people say voters should just go to courts. I’m trying to make sure only what goes to court is what needs to go to court.

Q. How confident are you that Minnesota will know its next senator by dusk on Dec. 19th?

Ritchie: My goal is to say how Minnesotans voted and the end of the day on the 19th is reasonable. There may be loose ends, and we won’t work on religious holidays. It’s a matter of justice that when we’ve signed certificate that we’ve done the best we can.

Q. Comfort level about judging challenged ballots?

Ritchie: In the 1962 recount, trying to get a pattern established about dealing with challenges, for instance how do you deal with ballots in which Mickey Mouse is written in? We could decide on that and then move a group of ballots together.

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Q. Are you uncomfortable that the board sided with Franken on both the rejected absentee ballots and the missing ballots in Minneapolis?

Ritchie: It was important the the canvassing board moves together in consensus. I’m not happy with how some of these issues have been presented in a partisan way. We had top jurists in the state. The work was careful. We moved on a consensus basis.