Judge Hayden. Photo: UpTake

Judge Hayden. Photo: UpTake

If only they’d used washable markers.

The Norm Coleman campaign this morning asked the judges in Minnesota’s Senate election contest trial to stop the secretary of state’s office from marking out numbers (pdf) on 933 absentee ballots that link them to the envelopes in which they arrived. But state workers have already blacked out almost all of the numbers, according to The UpTake.

UPDATE: The Secretary of State’s office now says half of the ballots remain unredacted. 

In a motion filed this morning, Coleman asked the court for a temporary injunction order to halt the redacting of the ID numbers. The work of separating envelopes from absentee ballots and marking out the numbers was included in the court’s Feb. 13 order, which also ruled out a dozen or so categories of absentee ballots from future re-examination.

Presiding Judge Elizabeth Hayden opened today’s session by announcing that the three-judge panel would hear arguments on a motion — possibly Coleman’s request for temporary injunction — later this afternoon.

Votes from the 933 ballots were added to the official election tally by order of the state Supreme Court during the last phase of the recount that ended last month. Attorneys for both Coleman and his rival, Democrat Al Franken, have since agreed those votes belong in the count.

But Coleman now contends that some of the 933 ballots fall into categories that the election trial court has refused to review as unlawfully cast. Because he might want to disallow some of the 933 votes on that basis — in itself, an about-face from pledges he wouldn’t seek to remove already-counted votes from the tally — he wants the redaction ordered a week ago to stop.

According to the UpTake, Deputy Secretary of State Jim Gelbmann said re-linking redacted ballots and envelopes would require forensic research. Still, the move could serve to bolster equal-protection claims that Coleman’s attorneys have been pressing with increasing vigor in and out of the courtroom.