After taking a folksy turn Tuesday with testimony from frustrated voters, Norm Coleman’s legal team began to deliver on the tedium it promised in the trial sparked by Coleman’s election-contest lawsuit. The folksy quotient remained high, however, as storied trial attorney Joe Friedberg charmingly dragged his mostly mild but unrelenting grilling of Deputy Secretary of State Jim Gelbmann — whom some wags have likened to the sheriff’s duck-painting husband in the movie “Fargo” — into a fourth hour this morning. It turned adversarial only by the end of Friedberg’s questions at 11:25 a.m.

Friedberg chivalrously escorted Gelbmann through a seemingly interminable series of absentee ballots that were rejected for various reasons in the Nov. 4 election pitting the incumbent Republican Sen. Coleman against Democratic challenger Al Franken. Gelbmann, whom the secretary of state’s office offered up as a witness at the Coleman camp’s request, nimbly recollected individual ballots from around the state like old pals. (Both sides cited his motto, “Every ballot has a story,” to buttress their arguments before reporters after court recessed Tuesday.)

The questioning appeared to take a dramatic turn when Friedberg said, “Let’s go there,” apparently intending to launch a discussion of the controversial Minnesota Supreme Court order that allowed both campaigns to prevent counting of individual ballots that local officials had determined, on review, they had wrongly rejected. But an objection from the Franken side sent Friedberg back to his stack of ballots, though not before getting Gelbmann to agree that the Supreme Court’s order disenfranchised voters.

The dry but congenial back-and-forth got a bit personal when Gelbmann testified that his mother’s Parkinson’s disease made it hard for her to sign her name. That echoed a much more emotional statement by Gelbmann’s boss, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, who told a Minnesota Senate committee earlier this month that his own grandmother’s tremors prevented her from filling in ovals on ballots.

Gelbmann seemed to be getting more testy — or perhaps simply more tired — as the morning dragged on, addressing Friedberg as “sir” with an edge to his voice that had thus far been mostly absent. Friedberg’s questioning by the end became more pointed as he angled for evidence that Minnesota didn’t offer voters across the state equal protection as they sought to exercise their franchise to vote.

At 11:25 a.m., Franken attorney David Lillehaug began his cross-examination of Gelbmann.