marc elias

After five weeks of testimony from voters and election officials, Norm Coleman’s legal team has finished making their case. The gist of their argument: the Senate election contest was rife with errors and the certification of Al Franken as the victor by 225 votes should be invalidated.
Tomorrow Al Franken’s legal team will begin making its own case, which will present a much sunnier assessment of the state’s election system.

Franken’s campaign wrote the Federal Elections Commission last week seeking permission to set up a new fundraising committee and another fund to help offset costs of a race that it called “virtually unprecedented in its length, complexity and expense.”

Ben Ginsberg, the flown-in rooster among Norm Coleman’s mostly local brood of election-contest attorneys, may now do his crowing in the courtroom. Until today, Ginsberg — a veteran of Bush v. Gore and the Swift Boat smearing of John Kerry in 2004 — has had to confine his masterful spinning of each day’s proceedings in [...]

And on the fourth day they rested? Minnesota’s top two elected officials spent the last three days talking economic stimulus on the airwaves and cable lines of two supposed bastions of liberal media, MSNBC and National Public Radio. Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Gov. Tim Pawlenty appeared on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” on successive nights, [...]

Al Franken’s attorney, Marc Elias, hailed a ruling today by the three-judge panel in Minnesota’s Senate election trial to count 24 (and possibly 25) rejected absentee ballots. Elias said he was glad to see people enfranchised, but also praised the judges “because of the careful method [they used] in analyzing these ballots.”

Al Franken should be allowed to serve in the U.S. Senate while a legal contest over the results of the election is heard in state court. That was, in essence, the argument made by Franken’s lawyer in a hearing before the Minnesota Supreme Court this morning.

Norm Coleman’s legal team called a half-dozen voters to the witness stand on the second day of Minnesota’s U.S. Senate election contest trial. Their personal tales of electoral woe went a ways toward refreshing the court’s palate after a disastrous Monday in which the judges chucked Coleman’s altered evidence, but not without lingering overtones of forgery.

The neverending U.S. Senate contest will now be put on trial. Beginning this afternoon a three-judge panel will weigh evidence on whether the state Canvassing Board got the vote tally right when it certified Al Franken as the winner by 225 votes.

Al Franken is asking the Minnesota Supreme Court to order Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Secretary of State Mark Ritchie to issue a signed certificate for Franken’s election to the U.S. Senate. Franken contends that one part of Minnesota law requiring a certificate to be issued trumps another that Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Secretary of State Mark Ritchie cited in turning down direct requests from Franken yesterday, pending former U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman’s lawsuit.

Al Franken’s campaign has written to Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Secretary of State Mark Ritchie asking that he be issued a certificate declaring him the winner of the U.S. Senate contest. Last week the state Canvassing Board certified results showing that Franken won the election by 225 votes, but former Sen. Norm Coleman has contested the results in state court.