Democrat Al Franken’s campaign attorney Marc Elias, responding to former U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman’s filing of an election contest today, said the Republican’s legal move “could charitably be called an uphill battle to try to overturn the will of the people.”

Elias dismissed the Coleman suit, which alleges mistakes in the recently concluded statewide recount, as being without merit — “essentially the same thin gruel, warmed over leftovers we’ve all been served over the last few weeks.”

Elias took note of one ”new twist” — a Coleman contention that some ballots should be declared invalid because election judges failed to initial them. Otherwise, he dismissed Coleman’s allegations — double-counted duplicate ballots, missing ballots, potentially valid but twice-rejected absentee ballots — as old and in some cases disproven news.

“When you lose by 225 votes, you have to go mining for votes somewhere,” Elias said, calling the lawsuit’s renewed claims about 133 ballots missing in Minneapolis as the equivalent of believing the earth is flat.

“We are on the precipice of the next phase,” said Elias, an East Coast resident who may have hoped to retreat to warmer climes by now. He predicted the election contest — in which a three-judge panel hears complaints about the vote count — would begin with procedural motions concerning the court’s jurisdiction, the scope of its review, and how the contest will proceed.

Both sides would raise the issue of additional ballots that could be reviewed, he said, but nothing will change the result announced Monday, “a historic day … when Al Franken was certified the winner by the State Canvassing Board.”

The reason: “There are certainly not the votes there.”