It was a part of a Minnesota Supreme Court order that few could love. Last month, the campaigns of Al Franken and Norm Coleman got the right, by a 3-2 court ruling, to reject absentee ballots that election officials had determined were lawfully cast.

And reject they did, leaving about 400 individual voters with only one way to re-enfranchise themselves: by filing a lawsuit of their own. But they have to do it by Jan. 12, according to courtesy letters the Secretary of State Mark Ritchie sent Jan. 7. And the price tag (don’t call it a poll tax) could be as high as $5,000 per voter, according to one local attorney with experience in election law.

Charles Shreffler, who before leaving private practice was one of the few local attorneys handling election law cases (for Republicans, he says), estimated in an interview today that the cost of an election contest would be at least $2,500 and more likely in the $3,000–$5,000 range. “It’s not rocket science,” he said of the legal work required, but the relative scarcity of specialists in the field — and the fact that many are already engaged by one side or the other in the Minnesota Senate recount — might play into the price.

The lawsuit Coleman’s campaign filed on Jan. 6 also took the form of an election contest, but one with a much wider scope than those that individuals receiving the letter from Bert Black, Ritchie’s legal adviser, would bring. Ritchie griped publicly about the Supreme Court’s ruling several times in the closing weeks of the recount, wondering aloud how a soldier in Baghdad whose valid absentee ballot a campaign vetoed would manage to file an election contest from the other side of the world.

The campaigns didn’t know what the votes were on the ballots they rejected; they only saw the outside envelopes that carried the absentee voters’ names and addresses. But campaign representatives had fairly wide latitude, as long as they completed a form giving a reason for each rejection.