Ritchie: Recount is A-OK. Coleman: I want a TRO.

Friday afternoon as Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie was lauding the work of the State Canvassing Board…

We just finished a very successful week. … It feels great. … The nation can heal from the mess in Florida where the recount was stopped.

… the campaign of U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman was at the Minnesota Supreme Court for the second time in a day, asking for an emergency temporary restraining order against the State Canvassing Board.

The Coleman camp’s motion (pdf) asks the state’s high court to stop the canvassing board from rejecting its challenges to ballots damaged badly enough to require duplicates to be made so vote counting machines could read their votes on Election Day. They’re supposed to be attached to each other, and Coleman alleges that instances in which only the original or duplicate can now be found suggest that both may have mistakenly been tabulated during the recount. The state Supreme Court (pdf) set a Tuesday afternoon date to hear the motion, which also asks the court to prevent the canvassing board from certifying a result that includes alleged duplicate votes.

The legal action was triggered by the canvassing board’s decision Friday that it could not evaluate challenges that would require them to gather facts about the alleged double-counting of duplicate ballots. That must be taken up elsewhere — meaning the courts — asserted the board members. The board, besides Ritchie, consists of two Ramsey County District Court judges and a pair of justices from the state Supreme Court (one of whom is its chief, and both of whom have so far recused themselves from hearing canvassing board-related cases).

Meanwhile, Ritchie sounded buoyant at a press conference after the canvassing board finished its day’s work in the middle of the afternoon rather than, as was recently the plan, laboring into the evening. Aided by massive withdrawals of challenged ballots by the Coleman and Al Franken campaigns early in the week, the board progressively quickened to a sometimes breakneck pace its review of those ballots, dispensing with what Ritchie said were “almost all” of an originally overwhelming stack of 6,655 challenged ballots in three and a half days.

Certifying a result — the board’s ultimate task — is “still a ways away,” Ritchie acknowledged, especially in view of Thursday’s state Supreme Court order, in response to another Coleman petition, giving counties until Dec. 31 to transmit to the board their wrongly rejected absentee ballots.

But next week’s will be a comparatively light schedule to address three issues: voter-intent questions on the remaining 100-some duplicate ballots; various discrepancies arising from the reconciling of lists of withdrawals and challenges, and the now court-mandated process of counting an estimated 1,600 wrongly rejected absentee ballots.

“We’re on track to do Minnesota proud,” Ritchie said.