Ramsey, Anoka and Hennepin counties as well as Mark Dayton’s legal team and Secretary of State Mark Ritchie have filed paperwork arguing against the Republican Party of Minnesota’s Supreme Court challenge alleging phantom votes and asking for a reconciliation of voter sign-ins with ballots in all 4,130 precincts in the state. All parties argue that precincts followed procedures that have been in place since 1982.

Election judges count the number of voter receipts and compare them to the number of ballots to ensure that no ballots have counted twice. The Emmer team wants all precincts in the state to go back and count precinct rosters where voters sign in on election day and compare those to the number of ballots instead. But, elections officials say that they’ve followed a modern interpretation of the law.

“Although Minnesota Statutes section 204C.20, subdivision 1, continues to refer to voter’s certificates that are no longer in use, Rule 8700.9300, subpart 10, allows election judges to determine the number of ballots to be counted by reference to either the number of voter’s receipts or signatures on the polling place roster,” wrote Ritchie in a filing with the court. “Furthermore, Petitioner’s supporting affidavits do not substantiate any claim that the reported election results are inaccurate. In fact, the petition does not suggest any reason why the use of voter receipts is more likely to generate errors than using the (now obsolete) certificates, or roster signatures.”

Hennepin County argued that the current manner of reconciling ballots is more accurate than the manner the Emmer team is arguing for.

“There is no requirement to compare the ballot total from the summary statement to a count of the number of signatures on the polling place rosters,” read the Hennepin County brief. “In 1982, a Minnesota Rule was added that authorized elections officials to use either the number of names om the polling place roster or the number of voter’s receipts when determining the number of ballots to be counted.”

The brief continued, “Voter’s receipts are a more accurate method for counting the number of voters than having election judges counting thousands of signatures from polling place rosters at the end of election night.”

Hennepin County also said that Emmer’s line of attack would disenfranchise voters.

“Any additional reconciliation lacks any factual support and would serve only to add confusion, delay, and uncertainty in the service of an exceedingly suspect goal of randomly removing properly cast ballots of fully eligible voters.”

Cynthia Reichert, elections manager for Anoka County, said her county only had one more ballot than receipt that couldn’t be explained by human or machine error, according to court documents. The county argued that tossing out that one vote, or many votes, would disenfranchise voters.

“There can be no reasonably based allegation that that ballot was not cast by a legal voter,” Anoka County wrote in the brief. “And any attempt to nullify that vote would only act to disenfranchise an Anoka County voter.”

Ramsey County said Emmer’s argument is flawed.

“The petitioners’ argument is fundamentally flawed because they rely on a statute that uses obsolete language that is inconsistent with modern election day practices,” according to a filing with the court.

Dayton’s campaign echoed those sentiments. “Relying on flawed arguments that could and should have been raised well in advance of the election, Candidate Tom Emmer now petitions this Court in an eleventh-hour effort to disrupt and delay the Canvassing Board certification process through the unwarranted disenfranchisement of voters,” Dayton’s legal team wrote. “This effort should be denied.”

Dayton’s team also had strong words for Emmer in a press release on Friday. “By bringing this up now, they’re acting like a four-year-old who just lost playing Candyland — they want to change the rules when they find out they lost. That’s not how elections work in Minnesota,” said Dayton recount director Ken Martin. “We play by the rules.”

The Minnesota Supreme Court is expected to take the issue up on Monday.

With a recount looking more and more likely, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie has laid out a plan for the canvasing operations. The recount of the governor’s race is set for Nov. 29, which will follow the Canvassing Board’s decision on whether a recount will happen. That board is scheduled to meet on Nov. 23. Leading up to those meetings, counties are prepping for the recount and dealing with an enormous number of data practices request from the campaigns. DFLer Mark Dayton leads Republican Tom Emmer by more than 8,700 votes.

Hennepin County conducted a post-election mandatory review and found that Dayton picked up three votes and Emmer lost 2 votes, for a net gain of 5 votes for Dayton. The process is part of a mandated review that all counties must undergo and is a hand count of random precincts. The county checked 13 precincts and 12,500 votes.

Ramsey County’s review showed there was no change from election night results.

St. Louis County, which has been the target of a lawsuit by the Emmer campaign and the Republican Party of Minnesota after the county said it would take at least 14 days to fill a request for voting machine tapes, summary statements, ballot security information, revisions to reported election night results, photocopies of all accepted and rejected absentee ballot information, names and addresses of everyone who applied for an absentee ballot, voter registration information, names of election judges, election night incident reports, and all information provided to the Dayton campaign. The county has announced that it is in negotiations to provide documents.

The duo also sued Pine County. Officials for the county told the Star Tribune on Tuesday they didn’t receive the data requests and only learned of the lawsuit in the local paper.

“I don’t think [the GOP and Emmer] handled it as well as they could have,” Pine County auditor Cathy Clemmer told Strib Eric Roper. “It would have been much simpler to pick up the phone and say, ‘Gee whiz, we haven’t heard from you. Did you get our e-mail?’ Instead of going directly to a lawsuit.”

While the statewide recount nears, three Minnesota House races are also at a razor thin margin. In District 15B, Republican St. Cloud State professor King Banaian has a 10-vote lead over DFLer Carol Lewis. In District 25B, Republican Kelby Woodard leads DFL Rep. David Bly by 31 votes and, in District 27A which contains Albert Lea, Republican Rich Murray leads Rep. Robin Brown by 57 votes. All three are within the 0.5 percent margin that triggers an automatic recount. Those recounts are scheduled for Nov. 29.

In an editorial on Tuesday, the Star Tribune questioned whether the 0.5 percent margin is too high a threshold to trigger a recount, noting that legislators had tried to scale it back to 0.25 percent.

“Had their bills become law, Gov.-elect Dayton likely would be announcing his top commissioner appointees this week,” the paper wrote. “Legislators of both parties would begin crafting legislation, knowing whose signature their bills would require in order to be enacted. And Minnesotans would at least be assured that their government was gearing up to tackle the biggest state fiscal crisis since the 1930s.”

“We have reason to be optimistic,” recount attorney Marc Elias told reporters at an afternoon press conference. “We are picking up votes across the state.”

The candidate himself — seldom seen locally since recount gears began turning — shared that view, according to communications director Andy Barr. “Al is cautiously optimistic,” Barr said.

Describing the stacks of ballots recounted by hand Wednesday as a “slightly redder” subset of the 2.9 million ballots cast on Election Day, Elias said the campaign believes Franken closed the gap with incumbent Republican Sen. Norm Coleman by more than the secretary of state’s official count of 43 votes.

Elias also claimed to have seen local examples of the same phenomenon in Hennepin, Ramsey and St. Louis counties, where Franken gained on Coleman in recounts of areas where the Nov. 4 election results show the Democrat didn’t run as well as in the remaining (yet unrecounted) precincts in those counties.

Elias said he was relying on internal campaign tallies of the recount’s Day One results, including reports from counties whose results came in too late at night to be part of the state’s official count at 8 p.m. Wednesday.

Elias also said that anecdotal evidence received Wednesday about frivolous challenges has emerged as a pattern. “There are clearly a significant number of instances of challenging clear Franken votes,” he said. “We have seen examples of challengers that clearly are not meritorious and will not be upheld by the Canvassing Board.”

Elias granted that some of the frivolous challenges he alleges could be due to first-day jitterson the part of Coleman workers. He also conceded that Franken’s challengers — who on Wednesday demanded that nearly as many ballots be set aside for Canvassing Board review as did the Coleman challengers — may have also been overzealous. “It’s a very good question,” he said. “It’s part of our review.”

Competing with the recount for the campaign’s attention, Elias said, were the newly arriving lists of voters whose absentee ballots had been rejected by county election officials. That flow of info follows a Ramsey County District Court ruling Wednesday ordering Ramsey Countyto provide any such lists to the Franken camp.

Barr said about three dozen counties had so far followed suit. But the data isn’t uniformly presented, Barr said, so the campaign wasn’t sure what it had yet and wouldn’t state what it plans to do with the lists. On Tuesday, the state Canvassing Board promised to consider whether it would conduct its own review of rejected absentee ballots.

Barr expressed satisfaction that the Coleman camp’s claims of victory were being taken with a grain of salt even in GOP circles. “It’s becoming increasingly clear that national Republicans are beginning to realize that Sen. Coleman has not been determined the winner of the race and are becoming concerned,” he said, noting in particular that some Republicans are already suggestions of other lines of work for Coleman, such as the post of Republican National Committee chairman.

But have you heard even one word yet from those voters?

“Oh, crap.”

Well, now you’ve heard two words.

Paula Guerra of St. Paul left for Utica, N.Y., on Oct. 11 to help her mother care for her ailing father. Her husband, Chris Farley, applied online to have Ramsey County send her an absentee ballot. It arrived two weeks before the election; Guerra mailed the ballot back the same day.

Then on Halloween, just four days before Election Day, Ramsey County returned Guerra’s ballot to her, unopened — rejected due to improper witnessing. Also included in the packet from the county were a new ballot and a page of instructions. “Oh, crap, I didn’t know this,” Guerra recalls thinking.

“There was a yellow sheet that they put in,” Guerra says. “It wasn’t in there the first time.”

The instructions explained that absentee voters who are out of state need to get their ballots signed by a notary public if no registered Minnesota voter is handy.

“I just had my sister sign as a witness,” Guerra said. Her sister is a New York resident. So this time Guerra got her mother-in-law, a notary public, to sign and stamp the ballot envelope.

“My God, you want to vote,” said the woman at the post office counter the next day, where Guerra paid a $15 overnight rate to send her second ballot back to Ramsey County.

It was supposed to arrive by Monday, or Tuesday morning, Election Day, at the latest.

“I’m really hoping it was counted,” Guerra says. “I wasn’t that concerned about Obama. It was for the Senate race. I knew it was going to be tight. It was on all the news shows.”

UPDATE: Guerra called Ramsey County after this post appeared to learn the status of her ballot. See this followup post. 

She said her ballot’s marked for Franken.

That instructions were missing from the first absentee ballot mailing appears to have been a mistake. The Ramsey County Elections office tells the Minnesota Independent that including the sheet is standard.

But Guerra and Farley say that her mishap might have been avoided had the ballot return envelope itself carried clearer directions. Another shortcoming they see, as Farley noted in a comment posted at MnIndy, is that the return envelope doesn’t provide space for a notary’s stamp and signature.

Ramsey County keeps records of rejected absentee ballots returned to voters, I was told today by an official who also invited Guerra to call to confirm her ballot was received and counted. Getting the names of absentee voters like Guerra who had ballots rejected but who may not have been as persistent — and may not have have been properly rejected in the first place — is the goal of a suit by the Franken campaign that was heard this morning in Ramsey County District Court, with the judge ruling in Franken’s favor this afternoon.

The story behind Guerra’s rejected absentee ballot demonstrates the difficulties that even well-intentioned and highly motivated voters can have from afar. Much of the recent debate over the Coleman-Franken U.S. Senate recount that commenced today in Minnesota has centered on whether the state will also examine absentee ballots to find (and count) any that local officials rejected improperly.

While voters’ intent on ballots that have been accepted is held sacred under Minnesota election law, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie has made clear that the best intentions of rejected absentee voters to properly cast ballots are not. Absentee ballots that fail simple rules about signing, witnessing and mailing simply don’t get counted.

And while one problem appears to be the lack of a mechanism to promptly remedy improper rejections, Paula Guerra’s case suggests another problem: following absentee voting rules isn’t made as simple as it should be.

Legally and politically, it’s a perfectly legitimate move to ensure that every vote is counted, but Team Franken stepped into a PR nightmare by embellishing the news of their lawsuit with the high-pathos anecdotal case of an 84-year-old Beltrami County woman whose ballot was rejected because a stroke had altered her signature. (MnIndy’s Chris Steller has video of the campaign’s telling of the story.)

But then, Lopez writes, “Beltrami County Auditor Kay Mack… questioned the campaign’s account, saying her office hadn’t rejected any ballots because of mismatched signatures. Mack said there was one instance of an 87-year-old woman in an assisted living center whose ballot was rejected because it bore no signature or mark. The law, Mack said, is ‘very clear’ about not accepting such ballots.

“After being contacted by the Star Tribune with Mack’s account, Franken campaign spokesman Andy Barr said Thursday night that there may have been ‘some confusion about our earlier field report,’ adding that the campaign is ‘still digging into the facts.’ Barr said the issue does not affect the merits of their lawsuit.”

Strictly speaking, Barr is right. And since the election is likely to be decided in court ultimately, the collateral damage from embarrassments like these may prove to be minimal. But it’s hardly an encouraging sign that the Franken campaign is faltering in foreseeable, preventable ways in the court of public opinion, especially when the Coleman campaign is seizing every opportunity to cast public doubt on the whole process.

Elias told a news conference this morning of the case in Beltrami County (where officials have already provided the names Franken seeks) in which an elderly woman’s absentee ballot was rejected because her current stroke-impaired signature didn’t match the signature on file.

Pressed for more examples, Elias and campaign spokesman Andy Barr declined, refusing even to enumerate how many such cases it had learned of, responding that learning about more such cases was the point of the lawsuit.

Another reason counties reject absentee ballots is improper witnessing, Elias noted — a point confirmed by Beth Fraser, director of government affairs at the Minnesota Secretary of State’s office, who also said in an interview with the Minnesota Independent that late-arriving absentee ballots get rejected.

UPDATE: Barr tells Minnesota Public Radio that the Franken campaign had gotten the Beltrami County story wrong and the unnamed woman’s absentee ballot had been rejected for improper witnessing, not a signature mismatch.

Only about a dozen counties have so far complied with the Franken campaign’s data requests, Elias said. Among the counties denying Franken the names are Minnesota’s largest, Hennepin and Ramsey in the Twin Cities. Elias said the campaign had learned from officials at unspecified counties that the Coleman campaign was also seeking the data, and he invited Coleman to join the suit. If the counties don’t comply, Elias said further legal action could follow.

Here’s video from today’s press conference at Franken campaign headquarters in St. Paul. It begins with spokesman Barr summing up a series of debunked reports about the vote count, followed by attorney Elias’ description of an improperly rejected absentee ballot and the campaign’s lawsuit to learn whose absentee ballots were rejected.

Half of you, come this way.

Inspired by a new Pioneer Press article and Minnesota GOP chair Ron Carey’s mastery of basic math, I decided to try again to understand why Ramsey County officials consider their oversupply of election judges remarkable. Wouldn’t they expect to have more willing judges than they need after they cut the number of available positions in half?

Here’s MPR’s accounting of the situation from last week:

In previous years, the county allowed the judges to work a half-shift. But this year, the 1,150 appointed judges will be required to work from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Election Day. … [F]or the first time in recent memory, the number of election judges in the county has exceeded the number of available positions. Typically, the county doesn’t have enough applicants.

And here’s the Pioneer Press today (hat tip Daily Glean):

“That’s never happened before,” said Joe Mansky, Ramsey County election manager, of the overabundance of people who stepping forward to fill 1,150 election judge slots in St. Paul. In previous years, the county allowed election judges to work a half-shift. But this year the appointees are going to be required to work a full shift.

Minneapolis Police Department officers stand guard outside the Food Not Bombs house. Photo: Jeff Severns Guntzel

Minnesota Independent RNC reporter Jeff Severns Guntzel is at the Minneapolis Food Not Bombs house, which was raided by police this morning. Facts are still coming in, but Guntzel says that at 8 a.m. neighbors near the home, located at 2301 23rd Avenue South, reported hearing a loud bang followed by yelling. A single police squad car was parked out front. When Guntzel arrived he saw eight or nine officers enter the house in what he says is a joint operation between officers of the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Department, the Minneapolis Police Depatment, and the FBI. According to one witness who was in the house at the time of the raid, the action is related to last night’s raid on the RNC Welcoming Committee’s “convergence space.” Several other spaces have been raided this morning.

Around 9:20, two Minneapolis Police Property & Evidence trucks pulled up. Present were a Hennepin County Sheriffs’ crime lab truck, a Ramsey County Sheriffs’ squad and an MPD squad, plus at least four unmarked cars parked facing the wrong direction in traffic. Police tape is marking off the yard.

Two men are released from the Food Not Bombs house as reporters, neighbors, and supporters look on. Photo: Jeff Severns Guntzel

At one point a five-year-old boy was escorted from the home by police. In what Guntzel calls a “sweet moment,” the boy told police he wanted his markers, and the officer went in and came back out a few minutes later. “These are the only colors I could find,” the officer said. “Did I get the right stuff?”

As MnIndy reported on Thursday, rumors of a weekend sweep of activist organizations have been swirling. In the last 12 hours, at least three other sites, from the RNC Welcoming Committee’s “convergence space” in St. Paul to sites in South Minneapolis have been raided.

Officers and agents from the Minneapolis Police Department, Hennepin County Sheriff's Office, Ramsey County Sheriff's office and the FBI collaborated on the raid. Photo: Jeff Severns Guntzel

9:45 A woman named Heather Adams just came out of the Food Not Bombs house and gave Guntzel the following account: She arrived from Chicago at 3 a.m. this morning with plans to protest at the RNC. At 8 a.m. she woke up to find police in the house wearing riot gear and camouflage flak jackets. She says they had rifles drawn. Adams has a broken ankle, and when officers ordered her to roll over on her stomach, she says she was slow to do so and the officer, she says, pushed her with his boot.

Adams says one arrest was made. Nathanael Secor, a main organizer of FNB, was arrested on charges of conspiracy to riot, she says.

9:54: Guntzel says a Ramsey County warrant was served, and the house is now occupied only by law enforcement agents. Evidence has been taken out the back of the house. Adams said law enforcement took photos of maps of St. Paul which were present in the house, as well as house plants. Adams also said that a city inspector was on site as well. The house, according to one law enforcement official, has links to the RNC Welcoming Committee.

10:03: Guntzel has in hand a Hennepin County warrant. It indicates law enforcement was searching for incendiary devices, smoke bombs, urine and feces, and other items. See a transcription of the warrant here. [Update: PDF]

In the alley behind the house, two Minneapolis Police Department Property & Evidence trucks wait to be loaded. Photo: Jeff Severns Guntzel

10:44: The RNC Welcoming Committee issued a press release noting that four individuals were arrested in the raids: Monica Bicking, Eryn Trimmer, Garrett Fitzgerald, and Nathanael Secor. The press release also notes that “Search warrants for 2 of the 3 raided houses listed only one name apiece, each of individuals not present at the houses and, thus, not arrested.”