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The 171 Maplewood ballots are off the table in the U.S. Senate contest. These ballots were discovered by local election officials in a voting machine during the manual recount and added to the vote tally. Norm Coleman’s legal team initially argued that they should not have been included in the recount, but this morning they withdrew their objection to the contested ballots.

Otherwise it was once again the Jim Gelbmann show throughout the morning at the  contest between Coleman and Al Franken. The Deputy Secretary of State spent his second third day on the stand discussing the vagaries of election law and various categories of contested ballots. He refused to concede that some ballots were counted twice during the recount (as argued by the Coleman camp), and painstakingly explained state rules for protecting the integrity of ballots.

The 133 ballots that went missing from a Minneapolis precinct prompted this exchange between Coleman attorney Joe Fiedberg and Gelbmann:

Friedberg: “The chain of custody is kind of academic in that case, isn’t it? There is none.”

Gelbmann: “For the 133 ballots that is a correct statement.”

Gelbmann is finally done on the stand. The court will reconvene at 1:30, presumably with a new witness.