Paul Anderson

Minnesota’s interminable U.S. Senate race may finally be over. More than seven months after election day, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled today that Democrat Al Franken prevailed by 312 votes over Republican Norm Coleman. Franken will almost certainly now become Minnesota’s junior senator. The court, however, did not explicitly order Gov. Tim Pawlenty to sign an election certificate.

Every ballot tells a story. Or maybe it doesn’t. That’s the debate that attorneys for Al Franken and Norm Coleman grappled with in oral arguments this morning before the Minnesota Supreme Court in the U.S. Senate election contest. Following a seven-week trial — which featured 142 witnesses and roughly 20,000 pages of legal documents — a three-judge panel determined that Franken won the election by 312 votes.

The Minnesota Supreme Court was visited by ghosts of Last Week Past on Tuesday afternoon as the two sides in the statewide Senate recount paid their second visit in five days. Attorneys for Democrat Al Franken and Republican U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman who debated last Friday about wrongly rejected absentee ballots argued over different issue today: the Coleman camp’s request to stop the recount to determine whether votes on ballots that were damaged and then duplicated for counting purposes on Election Day were counted twice during the recount.

You can’t tell the players in the Minnesota Senate recount drama with a scorecard — even a Politico blog that’s called The Scoreboard misattributed a quote (since corrected) on Monday from Marc Elias, a lawyer for Al Franken, as coming from Fritz Knaak, U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman’s recount attorney. Minnesota media mostly keep those two straight, but even locals find the profusion of Scandinavian surnames in the various recount venues vexing. More including the Anderson Effect and a Sven-and-Ole routine, after the jump.

A divided Minnesota Supreme Court ruled today that wrongly rejected absentee ballots should be counted in the U.S. Senate race. But the process ordered by the three-justice majority mandates that both campaigns must agree that a ballot was improperly invalidated if it is to be included in the final tally. The opinion was authored by Helen Meyer, with fellow justices Lorie Skjerven Gildea and Christopher Dietzen joining her in the majority. Justices Alan Page and Paul Anderson wrote strongly worded dissents, arguing that the ruling is inconsistent and inadequate for ensuring that every properly cast vote is counted.

Wednesday was a rough day for U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman in the three-ring circus of his re-election effort, but things could have been worse.
Coleman announced that he intends to attempt a risky use of campaign funds to pay high-priced attorneys and investigators to defend against charges that could result from an FBI investigation into $75,000 that his benefactor, [...]

Minnesota Supreme Court justices Eric Magnuson and G. Barry Anderson will not participate in a case involving the U.S. Senate race currently before the state’s top court. The last sentence of an order issued yesterday by the Supreme Court subtly announced this decision: “Magnuson, C.J., and Anderson, G. Barry, J., took no part in the consideration or decision of this matter.”

Tim Tingelstad’s challenge to current Supreme Court Justice Paul Anderson has flown under the radar in a year in which contentious presidential and congressional races in Minnesota have captured mainstream attention. Declaring that “judges must be God-fearing men and women,” Tingelstad is running a quiet campaign to bring radical Christianity to Minnesota’s Supreme Court.