Al Franken (Photo: Aaron Landry) and Norm Coleman (Photo: WDCpix.com)

Two of the first in a series of a dozen regional meetings that started today in Minnesota’s Senate election recount adjourned this morning after only an hour — with very different results.

In Sherburne County, representatives of the campaigns of Al Franken and U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman agreed to forward to the State Canvassing Board 15 of 18 unopened absentee ballots that local election officials decided last week had been wrongly rejected.

But next door in Anoka County the process prescribed by order of the state Supreme Court quickly collapsed, with the rival campaigns at loggerheads over the Coleman representative’s insistence on including ballots that local officials had not selected as having been wrongly rejected. Coleman’s camp wanted to add about 10 ballots to the 35 that Anoka County Elections Department had identified as belonging in the so-called “fifth pile” of unopened absentee ballots, Anoka Elections Supervisor Rachel Smith said. Franken’s forces rejected that move.

“Both campaigns refused to participate.” That’s how Smith described the situation to the Minnesota Independent. After about 45 minutes, the meeting was adjourned with no action on the uncounted ballots. The Supreme Court’s Friday deadline for submitting the ballots to the state can only be met if the meeting participants come to some agreement, Smith said. But due to the New Year’s holiday and staff scheduling, any follow-up meeting will have to occur today or Wednesday.

Coleman’s camp tried to introduce new uncounted ballots in Sherburne County too, but local officials there refused. Sherburne County will send the secretary of state an explanation for why the three “fifth pile” ballots aren’t included with the other 15, County Election Manager Steve Klepsa told MnIndy. The 18 were the only absentee ballots of more than 4,000 cast in Sherburne County to be wrongly rejected.

In Anoka County, the 35 fifth-pile ballots were the only ones wrongly rejected out of 13,000 that voters submitted, Smith said.

Two other counties with only a handful of uncounted ballots each also held their meetings today at the two north metro locations, Isanti County at Anoka County and Mille Lacs County at Sherburne County. Other counties where officials are holding public reviews of fifth-pile ballots today include Dakota, Kandiyohi, Olmsted, Beltrami and St. Louis. The meetings continue Wednesday and Friday in Wright, Blue Earth, Otter Tail, Crow Wing, and Polk counties.

Read the e-mail after the jump.

Dear Minnesota Voters:

You likely know that the recount in the Minnesota senate race is ongoing. Our own
Al Franken is trailing by a very few votes. And, as we have learned, many absentee
ballots are being disqualified.

In order to ensure that all overseas Democratic votes are counted, we urge those of
you who have reason to believe that your ballot was not counted to call your local
election office. Ask if your absentee ballot (state or FWAB) is being counted and
if not, why not. Remember how too many of you ran into the self-certifying issue
when you sent in your ballot for the Nov. 4 election! If you are sure that your
ballot was counted, do not call (we don’t want to inundate or rile local officials
with unnecessary calls). But if have any doubt at all, do call.

Ask to speak with the person in charge of overseas voting. Be sure to get the name
of the person you are speaking to. Be polite but firm. You have a right to know if
your ballot will be counted. Please do not identify yourself as a Democrat. You
are a voter, period!

If you learn that your ballot will not be counted, send an email immediately to
[email obscured] with all the details of your conversation including
your voting address and full contact information (phone and email).

Go to http://www.votesmart.org/voter_county_election_offices.php where you can get the phone number of your local (county) election office.

Please do it NOW.

“My vote was counted,” Guerra said, triumphantly. “They got it November 3. It makes me feel a whole lot better. I thought I would have to live with never knowing. It’s an important election.”

Guerra’s experience has left her husband, Chris Farley, of the opinion that it’s “onerous” to require that out-of-state absentee ballots carry the signature of a registered Minnesota voter as witness, or the signature and seal of a notary public.

[M]y wife spent part of the afternoon on the Saturday before the election trying to get a notary. She told me she went to a local bank (where you can always find a notary). They asked if she was a customer. Nope, she was not. So they told her they would not notarize anything at any price. … After she called to tell me this, I remembered that my mother, who also lives in Utica, NY, is a notary public … Phew! Finding a notary public is a somewhat obscure skill. I bet the vast majority of young voters, who’ve never needed to have anything notarized in their lives, have no clue where to go for this service. It’s pretty obvious that this requirement suppresses absentee voter participation.

Only 12 other states have witness/notary requirements on par with Minnesota’s. A few others require a second signature if the voter has received assistance in completing the ballots, but most have no such requirement at all.

“It’s just weird considering Minnesota’s otherwise liberal voting laws,” comments Farley.

But have you heard even one word yet from those voters?

“Oh, crap.”

Well, now you’ve heard two words.

Paula Guerra of St. Paul left for Utica, N.Y., on Oct. 11 to help her mother care for her ailing father. Her husband, Chris Farley, applied online to have Ramsey County send her an absentee ballot. It arrived two weeks before the election; Guerra mailed the ballot back the same day.

Then on Halloween, just four days before Election Day, Ramsey County returned Guerra’s ballot to her, unopened — rejected due to improper witnessing. Also included in the packet from the county were a new ballot and a page of instructions. “Oh, crap, I didn’t know this,” Guerra recalls thinking.

“There was a yellow sheet that they put in,” Guerra says. “It wasn’t in there the first time.”

The instructions explained that absentee voters who are out of state need to get their ballots signed by a notary public if no registered Minnesota voter is handy.

“I just had my sister sign as a witness,” Guerra said. Her sister is a New York resident. So this time Guerra got her mother-in-law, a notary public, to sign and stamp the ballot envelope.

“My God, you want to vote,” said the woman at the post office counter the next day, where Guerra paid a $15 overnight rate to send her second ballot back to Ramsey County.

It was supposed to arrive by Monday, or Tuesday morning, Election Day, at the latest.

“I’m really hoping it was counted,” Guerra says. “I wasn’t that concerned about Obama. It was for the Senate race. I knew it was going to be tight. It was on all the news shows.”

UPDATE: Guerra called Ramsey County after this post appeared to learn the status of her ballot. See this followup post. 

She said her ballot’s marked for Franken.

That instructions were missing from the first absentee ballot mailing appears to have been a mistake. The Ramsey County Elections office tells the Minnesota Independent that including the sheet is standard.

But Guerra and Farley say that her mishap might have been avoided had the ballot return envelope itself carried clearer directions. Another shortcoming they see, as Farley noted in a comment posted at MnIndy, is that the return envelope doesn’t provide space for a notary’s stamp and signature.

Ramsey County keeps records of rejected absentee ballots returned to voters, I was told today by an official who also invited Guerra to call to confirm her ballot was received and counted. Getting the names of absentee voters like Guerra who had ballots rejected but who may not have been as persistent — and may not have have been properly rejected in the first place — is the goal of a suit by the Franken campaign that was heard this morning in Ramsey County District Court, with the judge ruling in Franken’s favor this afternoon.

The story behind Guerra’s rejected absentee ballot demonstrates the difficulties that even well-intentioned and highly motivated voters can have from afar. Much of the recent debate over the Coleman-Franken U.S. Senate recount that commenced today in Minnesota has centered on whether the state will also examine absentee ballots to find (and count) any that local officials rejected improperly.

While voters’ intent on ballots that have been accepted is held sacred under Minnesota election law, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie has made clear that the best intentions of rejected absentee voters to properly cast ballots are not. Absentee ballots that fail simple rules about signing, witnessing and mailing simply don’t get counted.

And while one problem appears to be the lack of a mechanism to promptly remedy improper rejections, Paula Guerra’s case suggests another problem: following absentee voting rules isn’t made as simple as it should be.