David Schultz

The campaign of former Sen. Norm Coleman has alerted donors that a database containing personal data, including credit card numbers, has been circulating on the Internet.

Minnesota has a number of consumer protection laws that govern the use of personal information, which has raised questions about whether the Coleman campaign has violated state law.

St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman says his focus is simply on winning a second term. But many observers — including one of his predecessors — say his recent staffing changes suggest he’s eying the governor’s mansion.

To stamp out voter fraud, GOP legislators have offered a proposal that would make Minnesota’s voter-ID laws the most restrictive in the country. But according to their own party, no actual cases of voter fraud have been reported here.

Without a new state law requiring a provisional election certificate in cases like Al Franken’s, Minnesota could be without its second U.S. senator for four to five months. That’s the opinion of Hamline University School of Law professor David Schultz, who advised state Rep. Phyllis Kahn on her bill that would seat Franken temporarily until former U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman’s current election contest trial is resolved.

Al Franken won the U.S. Senate contest by 225 votes. That was the determination that the five-member State Canvassing Board put their signatures to on Monday. Franken duly declared victory, pronouncing himself the “next senator from Minnesota.”

But as subsequent events have made abundantly clear that doesn’t mean the never-ending Senate contest is over. Indeed the legal contest filed by Norm Coleman’s campaign on Tuesday means it could still drag on for months. Here’s a quick primer on what will unfold in the coming weeks.

As the U.S. Senate contest lurches forward, with nearly 80 percent of the ballots recounted and Norm Coleman clinging to a roughly 200-vote lead over Al Franken, a resolution finally looks to be on the horizon. But as events have repeatedly proven over the last three weeks, nothing is as simple as it seems when a senate seat that potentially could give Democrats a fillibuster-proof 60-seat majority is on the line. All eyes will now turn to the five-member statewide canvassing board as it meets tomorrow to deal with the thorny question of whether to consider absentee ballots that were rejected by local election officials.

In this week’s edition of the Schultz Report audiocast, David Schultz examines the looming vote recount in the Minnesota US Senate face-off between Sen. Norm Coleman and Al Franken.

Is the situation here another Florida 2000 cage match, as so many pundits are claiming? In most respects, Schultz thinks the answer is no. But when it comes to the stakes and the political gamesmanship, that’s another matter.

In politics as in the intensive care unit, a flat line is usually a sign that something bad is happening. At the moment, however, I’m looking at the essentially flat — actually slightly declining — arc of Al Franken’s polling performance in the Minnesota US Senate race, and that line describes a very different story: the transformation of Franken from also-ran to frontrunner without ever budging more than a couple of points in poll standings.

How did this happen?

David Schultz, who’s been in Europe on a speaking tour about the US elections, is back with us again for a new installment of the Schultz Report. In this edition, we talk about the recent tightening in some of the national presidential polls, the Minnesota Senate race between Norm Coleman, Al Franken, and Dean Barkley, and — of course — the controversy engendered by Rep. Michele Bachmann’s rant about Barack Obama and other “anti-Americans” last Friday.

The Schultz Report audiocast is on hold while David Schultz is traveling in Europe and parts of the former Soviet Union on a speaking tour about the US elections. But we managed to catch up with Schultz via e-mail earlier today in Finland (yesterday it was Estonia), where he graciously took time to answer a couple of questions about races back in Minnesota — specifically, what he made of the diametrically opposed Minnesota Senate and presidential polls we wrote about Monday, and why Senate candidate Dean Barkley seems to be taking a disproportionate amount of his support from Norm Coleman.