Franken recount attorney Marc Elias told reporters the campaign would continue reviewing — and if need be, withdrawing — challenged ballots through Dec. 16, when the State Canvassing Board meets to begin a three-day process of tallying the recount. Elias characterized the work of reviewing Franken’s ballot challenges as “trying to narrow the universe.”

Elias expressed concern on three fronts: first, that some unnamed number of counties are refusing to sort rejected absentee ballots as Secretary of State Mark Ritchie instructed. Elias said for now the campaign was hoping the secretary of state’s office could work out any problems with counties that are not yet sorting out a so-called “fifth pile” of absentee ballots that were rejected for a reason other than the four reasons allowed by state law.

Elias said the Franken camp continues to be concerned that so far Minneapolis officials haven’t found 133 lost ballots during the overtime Ritchie granted them after Friday’s recount deadline for counties statewide. He said he took heart, however, from a Ritchie reference over the weekend to what Elias termed longstanding precedent for using the precinct’s existing vote tabulation even if the ballots that would corroborate that count aren’t found.

Elias also devoted several minutes — a significant portion of the 30-minute conference call with reporters from local and national media outlets — asserting that Minneapolis must count 12 other ballots sent from overseas that elections workers discovered while searching for the missing 133 from the city’s now-notorious Precinct 1, Ward 3. He said the city’s own records show there already are 19 such ballots uncounted due to election-judge error and cited precedent in recent days in which officials in Hennepin, Becker, Itasca and Scott counties included legitimately cast ballots discovered after Nov. 4.

It’s there, in the Dinkytown neighborhood on the edge of the University of Minnesota campus, that poll workers recorded 133 more votes than they have ballots to show for it. It’s also there that students trying to vote via Minnesota’s same-day registration process were turned away in a re-run of a major snafu at another campus polling place during the general election two years ago.

As the Minnesota Independent reported Nov. 25, residents at The Chateau student co-op highrise who tried to register at the polls on Election Day, using proof of residency issued by the building’s management office as a second form of ID, were turned away until as late as 5 p.m. For the MnIndy video accompanying that story, student Jill Stein told of returning to the polling place twice before giving up and voting at her parents’ home precinct in the suburbs. How many of the 290 students who live in The Chateau likewise made honest attempts but were ultimately unable to vote is anyone’s guess.

The Chateau fiasco is a direct descendant of a similar situation that happened nearby during the 2006 election, as Beth Fraser, government affairs director at the Minnesota Secretary of State’s office, explained in an interview with MnIndy last month. Residents of the Melrose Student Suites, an off-campus housing complex in the nearby Stadium Village area, likewise pay utilities as part of their rent, and poll workers rejected documentation from the building management as a form of ID.

Just as with Chateau residents this year, students from the Melrose who tried to register at the polls in 2006 had to wait until late on Election Day to cast their ballots. That’s when Hennepin County Judge Gary Larson ruled in favor of a petition from Melrose resident and first-year U of M student Greg Shaffer. Larson ordered election officials to accept the Melrose proof of residency and to keep the polling place open an hour later. In doing so, Larson overruled a decision by then-Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer to deny the students ballots.

The case had broader repercussions. The new secretary of state who won election in 2006, Mark Ritchie, wanted to take the office in a voter-positive direction after the Kiffmeyer-era policies that sometimes emphasized voter suppression. In the wake of the Melrose decision, his office “proposed and adopted
 rule changes to allow the use of the itemized rent statement in lieu of a 
utility bill,” Fraser wrote in an e-mail to MnIndy this week. As she tells it:

In 2008, a new proof of residence was authorized specifically to address the 
challenges of registering to vote by those whose utilities are included in 
their rent: a rent statement from a resident’s landlord that itemizes their 
utilities. The statement that the Chateau originally provided did not 
suffice, because it was not addressed to the student and did not itemize 
their utility expenses. Residents of the Chateau later received a revised
statement and used it to register to vote.

But despite Ritchie’s intention to resolve this kind of polling-place problem, the new rule came as a surprise to The Chateau’s management when they found out about it on Election Day, and the result was the same for students who were unable to vote for most of the day.

How does Ritchie’s office plan to avoid yet another repeat of the problem next time? Fraser writes:

This office will work with the Minnesota Multi Housing Association and student organizations to ensure that apartment building owners and students are familiar with what is needed in a rent statement that can be used in combination with a photo ID for the purpose of Election Day Registration.

The Minnesota Daily, in an editorial this week — following a news story that, like MnIndy’s, featured Chateau resident Jill Stein — recommended just such an approach to city election officials, reminding its student readers, “Your vote should count.”

But with the lost and missing votes in Minneapolis Precinct 1, Ward 3 already playing a central role in the current recount drama, more drastic proposals for Minnesota to get its election practices right are sure to be advanced.

Indeed, one already has: Ritchie’s rival for the DFL endorsement in 2006, Christian Sande, wrote an article earlier this year urging the state to consider following Wisconsin’s example and grant responsibility for managing elections to a commission of current and retired judges. It’s a move that could involve doing away with the office of secretary of state altogether.

“There are votes in Minnesota that aren’t even being accounted for, much less being counted,” spokesman Andy Barr told reporters at a press conference at Franken headquarters in St. Paul this afternoon.

Franken’s recount attorney, Marc Elias, said the campaign had become aware of the problem in the last few days from reports in the press as well as from campaign workers in the field. “Ballots have gone missing,” Elias said, calling it “a serious matter [that is] very concerning.”

He named more than a half dozen instances — from St. Paul to Duluth, and Crystal to Apple Valley — where the recount has turned up discrepancies between the number of recorded votes and the number of ballots county officials have been able to produce. And besides the cases reported in the news media, Elias said, the campaign’s own information indicates “this problem may be even more widespread.”

Elias acknowledged that “sometimes ballots go missing and then they get found” and that “missing ballots are not automatically an indicator that there is cause for concern.”

“In an election this close we cannot let any lawful vote go uncounted, and neither can we allow ballots to simply go lost,” Elias said.

Elias said the campaign’s letter to Ritchie would ask him to “launch an investigation to identify any and all missing ballots, and to immediately instruct local elected officials to redouble their efforts to find all missing ballots.”

As for the recount itself, Elias said the Franken campaign’s internal numbers, based on the judgment of the recount officials rather than challengers from either campaign, indicate that “the margin remains in double digits. In fact, it has narrowed since Friday.” He said that included ballots recounted on Saturday but not today. Official figures as of Saturday night had Coleman ahead by 167 votes with two-thirds of ballots recounted.

“When will Franken be ahead?” a reporter asked. “When it’s over,” Elias answered. He said the ballots already recounted remain “a slightly redder pile,” a subset that’s more Coleman-friendly than either the ballots remaining to be counted or the total ballots cast Nov. 4 taken as a whole.

Barr and Elias said nothing about events in Mower County today, where The UpTake has taken reports of recount officials and Franken challengers in conflict. The latest word is that tensions have calmed, apparently following a call from Ritchie.

Elias acknowledged the growing number of challenged ballots in the recount but said that in the end, the State Canvassing Board determines which candidates gets the votes from challenged ballots. “And there is nothing that either campaign can do about that by issuing challenges.”

Note: The Minnesota Independent hopes to cover Sen. Norm Coleman’s press conferences as we have Al Franken’s; however, Coleman’s campaign staff has refused entry to and in one instance ejected our reporters.

Video via The UpTake