Franken witnesses. Photo: UpTake

Former U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman said the judges hearing his contest of Minnesota’s statewide recount are “going to have to reflect on” whether a do-over election is needed. Meanwhile, Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele accused Al Franken of “stealing Norm Coleman’s U.S. Senate seat,” and Franken’s lawyers began to make their case in court, with witnesses whose signature mismatches were straight out of a Sherlock Holmes story.

The fullest account of what Coleman said in the corridor outside the courtroom is in the Pioneer Press:

“The number of illegal ballots may far exceed the difference between the candidates, and how the court resolves that, I don’t know,” Coleman told reporters. “Whether we can clean this up and whether we can sort it out, I can’t tell you right now.”

Asked whether one solution may be to redo the election — a possibility one of his attorneys raised in a letter to the judges — Coleman said: “In the end, I think, that’s something folks have to think about. … The court is going to have to reflect on that.”

Coleman’s statements came a day after his attorney wrote to the judges that one remedy is to “set aside the election.” (Franken’s attorneys’ response: “Pshaw.”)

Actually it’s surprising Republicans would even consider letting Franken off with a simple do-over when they’ve got the goods on him. According to a Monday fund-raising letter from RNC Chair Steele, Franken is “stealing Norm Coleman’s U.S. Senate seat in Minnesota.”

Among Franken’s accomplices in that theft, apparently, are the 23 ordinary voters who testified Tuesday during the Democrat’s first day presenting his case in the election contest trial.

A common thread to their stories of electoral woe: mismatched signatures. Several explained they regularly use two different signatures — one for when they’ve got plenty of time and another “hurry-up” version.

The election officials who rejected those ballots clearly haven’t been reading enough Sherlock Holmes lately. From “The Man with the Twisted Lip“:

“And you are sure that this is your husband’s hand [writing]?”

“One of his hands.”

“One?”

“His hand when he wrote hurriedly. It is very unlike his usual writing, and yet I know it well.”

Voters who have trouble filling in an oval on a ballot get no sympathy from state Sen. Dick Day and state Rep. Mary Kiffmeyer, leaving Kiffmeyer’s successor as Secretary of State, Mark Ritchie, to preach love, constitutional protection and enfranchisement for tremorous or otherwise-impaired citizens. For all three the issue is personal:

Day: “I personally don’t care if they’re disenfranchised or not and most of the people that I talk to don’t really care.”

Kiffmeyer: “My personal feeling sometimes is that I don’t know that I owe it to you to figure out your confusing ballot.”

Ritchie: “My grandmother, sharp as a tack until the day she died, shook. She could not fill in a circle. … I’ve heard from many people who’ve been disparaging — if you cannot fill in a circle, that breaks my heart when I think about my grandmother.”

Full quotes and video of Day and Ritchie after the jump.

In addition to offering prescient comments about ferreting out wrongly-accepted absentee ballots in the Senate recount, Kiffmeyer spoke to the St. Paul Legal Ledger on the topic of sloppy voters:

Kiffmeyer has little sympathy for voters whose cast ballots were not clearly marked. “My personal feeling sometimes is that I don’t know that I owe it to you to figure out your confusing ballot,” she said. “Maybe you’re just confused. And how am I going to figure out your confusion?”

Minnesota law, however, requires that election officials in a recount situation delve into the “intent of the voter” – as Kiffmeyer acknowledges – if intent can be clearly determined. “But if it is so confusing that you’re really taking kind of a blind guess, then OK, it’s undecided,” Kiffmeyer said. “It’s no vote for anybody.”

Day and Ritchie were captured on video by The Uptake during a state Senate committee hearing Friday. Here’s the clip, followed by transcriptions of their comments courtesy of MN Progressive Project:

Day:

“If the stupidity is such, that there’s Ys and arrows and Xs, and whatever, why isn’t it that we can put it in a machine, and if the machine can’t read what somebody is trying to vote for, I personally don’t care if they’re disenfranchised or not and most of the people that I talk to don’t really care because if you’re educated and you can’t fill an oval in, … would it better if the machine can’t read it, that’s it. We just don’t sit around and spend, and go through five or ten thousand ballots that somebody might wanted vote for somebody … I don’t know. That seems to me just a huge waste of time, so explain to me why I’m wrong here on that.”

Ritchie:

“Madame Chair, Senator Day, the founders of our nation and the writers of the Minnesota Constitution did not require that the citizens only be able to vote if they can comply with the demands of the machine manufacturers. My grandmother, sharp as a tack until the day she died, shook. She could not fill in a circle. So, if the proposal is that if you can’t comply with the conditions of the manufacturer of machines, wonderful machines that give us great accuracy and great, very timely results in most respects, then you don’t get to vote, then that’s a dramatic change from the founders of the nation and the writers of the Minnesota Constitution. It is a proposal that I’ve heard from many people who’ve been disparaging — if you cannot fill in a circle, that breaks my heart when I think about my grandmother, and that somebody’s saying she should not be allowed to vote because the machine manufactured by a company in Taiwan cannot read her vote.”

That’s the message DFL state Sen. Ann Rest and Republican state Rep. Laura Brod had on MPR today for the breed of voters whose enigmatically marked ballots were on display during the recent Senate recount. Their cramped scribbles drew widespread derision from observers who apparently always colored inside the lines. State Canvassing Board members were often left scratching their heads at chicken-scratch markings as they tried to determine voter intent — a concept held sacred in state law.

But the ovals are apparently secure. The two state leaders, each with electoral reforms on her mind, sounded nonplussed unenthusiastic about the idea of changing ballot design to help more voters cast clear votes.

“I don’t think that the ballot itself is necessarily the problem,” Brod said. “It’s a pretty clear ballot. We’ve just got to get people to fill the circle in and do it right. That’s just a matter of education.”

For her part, Rest acknowledged that ”it is our obligation to find ways to make it easier for Minnesotans to vote in an election,” but said the solution to errant ballot markings is “increased and more sophisticated training of election judges.”

The currently prescribed two to three hours of training don’t prepare workers to handle a rush of voters, who, because “they’re very young or very old, are not paying attention and mark an X in a box rather than filling in an oval, she said.

“As we gain more experience with our paper ballot, that will become less of an issue,” Rest assured the radio audience.

Five Franken cards-a-greeting (Flickr)

Al Franken’s campaign dismissed as mere theory U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman’s contention that duplicate ballots resulted in more than 100 votes being counted twice in Minnesota’s Senate recount. The Minnesota Supreme Court took a pass on the charges, despite the Coleman camp’s claim that including the contested ballots in a statewide tally would dilute the value of the other 2.9 million votes that were only counted once.

So what are we to think when a Minnesota voter comes forward to report that her household received five duplicate holiday cards from Franken? Does that dilute the cheer-value of greetings that others on Franken’s mailing lists received? The way the recount’s been going, you can expect mail fraud charges in the offing.

Challenging Math: The Strib reports that a win by Al Franken will be something of a long shot: He’ll have to win “6 percent of his challenges of Coleman votes even if Coleman fails to succeed on any of his challenges.” Ramsey County election manager Joe Mansky says historical trends show that’d be difficult. “Franken’s best [and perhaps his only] chance will be in court, not with the recount,” he added.

While Norm Coleman’s campaign puts the gap between the candidates at 282 votes, Team Franken sticks with a lower figure: just 73 votes.

Ballot Challenge: We’ve said it before, the best way to grasp what election officials are up against is to look at the disputed ballots themselves. The Strib kindly offers 599 for your consideration. (h/t Braublog)

Sen. Franken (or Coleman), you’re late for work: Sharon Schmickle writes an important piece at MinnPost today about the possibility of Minnesota’s Senate race not being decided by the time Barack Obama is sworn in as president. Obama is predicted to make his first executive act the signing of economic-recovery legislation, and to make that happen Democrats are already negotiating with colleagues and drafting legislation (Schmickle says Wisconsin Rep. Dave Obey is working on the jobs-creation component now). So even if a victor is declared by Dec. 19, which is hugely unlikely, the winner will already be late for work. Schmickle says some Republicans, alarmed by the financial crisis, will likely cross the aisle to support the Democrats’ package (not without a fight, though), but a Sen. Franken or a Sen. Coleman in Minnesota could make a huge difference.

Palin and Ludicris campaigning: OK, it has little do to with the Minnesota recount — except that it involves another yet-to-be-resolved Senate race that could help give Democrats a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate: Ahead tomorrow’s run-off, Sarah Palin is heading to Georgia today to campaign on behalf of incumbent Sen. Saxby Chambliss.  The big gun Democrat Jim Martin is calling in? Rapper Ludicris.

Brie Cohen, shooting for the Albert Lea Tribune, got up and under to add drama to counting at the Freeborn County Government Center Wednesday.

A few government-issue desks or folding tables. Stacks of paper. Bleary-eyed officials peering at the umpteenth ink-smudged ballot. Minnesota has seen its share of surprisingly arresting imagery about mundane processes — meeting photos by Jerome Liebling and, more recently, Minneapolis’ Paul Shambroom’s four-year project in which he criss-crossed America photographing government convenings — but this week’s statewide recount has offered little in the way of fodder for photojournalists looking for compelling imagery.

While many valiant (and some successful) attempts have been made, the recount photos tend to be dull. And in fine-art photography, that can even be okay, at least according to Shambroom. A former news photographer, he presented his “Meetings” series as a set of 40 photos accompanied by full minutes of meetings, the blase faces of, say, the Marshfield, Missouri, aldermen mirroring the nouns and verbs that contribute to the tedium.

But in news, viewers have little time to pore over images and, with smaller sizes and lower-resolution printing, they likely have less interest in doing so. These images need to be emblematic, arresting.

“What works as a piece of art on the wall does not necessarily work as a news photo,” Shambroom says. “In fact, they’re sort of diametrically opposed.”

How would Shambroom photograph the recount if he was assigned to the job?  “I’d try to embrace the boredom,” he said. “That’s what I did in my ‘Meetings’ to make them interesting to me. I’d take what is the strongest visual quality of those situations, which is the boredom, and just kind of put my arms around it.” (Put on the spot by my Friday-afternoon call, he acknowledged he couldn’t yet say what that might look like.)

Shambroom adds that the most interesting recount photography he’s seen this week have been images of the disputed ballots themselves — a point St. Paul-based photographer Alec Soth made in an email to me today.

“I thought that these documents are more telling than (1) pundits (2) photographs of election booths, etc.,” Soth wrote. “Raw documentation, be it a cell-phone snap or a scan of a piece of paper to me seems more powerful.”

Now, a look at some of this week’s news photos:

The Star Tribune’s Larry Holt captures an election judged flanked by campaign monitors on Wednesday in Northeast Minneapolis.

Police tape adds visual interest – and DANGER! — in this New York Times photo by Caroline Yang.

Ditto for this Pioneer Press image shot by Scott Takushi in Hastings.

Elizabeth Flores of the Star Tribune gives a good glimpse of how annoying counting must be with challengers like Bob Murray of the Coleman campaign hovering over your shoulder.

MnIndy’s Paul Demko took a straightforward approach, capturing the recount — as this tallier’s facial expression suggests — in all its glorious tedium.

Then there’s the array of dull shots of white people with paper and tables:

The Farmington Independent

The Crookston Daily Times

The Worthington Daily Globe

Hands down, the best photography of the recount yet, as Soth and Shambroom concurred, show the ballots themselves — but not because of artistry. Documentation of challenged ballots illustrate clearly — and hilariously, at times — just what the Franken and Coleman camps are fighting over.

MPR’s “Challenged Ballots: You be the judge” post has got to be the site’s top traffic generator ever. I’ve seen it linked locally and nationally, on buttoned-up news sites and Comedy Central’s Indecision ‘08. That last one, which references the infamous contested write-in vote for “Lizard People” (destined to be our “Hanging Chad of Aught Eight”), ends with a few salient questions:

Should the county have accepted the Franken vote? Does the voter consider Al Franken equivalent to the Lizard People? Is Lizard People a collective, or just one person like Cat Power? If elected, will the Lizard People rule benignly or will they control us with their forked-tongue tyranny?

Currently MPR is the top hit on a Google search for the term “Lizard People” (followed by “The Best Conspiracy Theories (Lizard-People Are Running the World!“). Whoever these reptilian-Americans are, MPR, Al Franken and Norm Coleman really put them on the map. In fact, according to Google Trends, they weren’t anywhere at all up til now.