recount

It’s apparently hard for reporters to find an ordinary voter to comment on the extraordinary struggle over Minnesota’s vacant U.S. Senate seat. The latest example: The Associated Press cited one person — who didn’t vote for either Al Franken or Norm Coleman — in its story Monday about Minnesotans being “tired” of the Senate battle. [...]

File this under “It Can’t Hurt to Ask”: Al Franken’s lawyers plan to request Friday that judges dismiss Norm Coleman’s lawsuit contesting the Minnesota U.S. Senate election recount that put Franken up by 225 votes.

Former U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman said the judges hearing his contest of Minnesota’s statewide recount are “going to have to reflect on” whether a do-over election is needed. Meanwhile, Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele accused Al Franken of “stealing Norm Coleman’s U.S. Senate seat,” and Franken’s lawyers began to make their case in court, with witnesses whose signature mismatches were straight out of a Sherlock Holmes story.

“Set aside the election.”
Those four words appear as the “most appropriate remedy,” in a letter that Norm Coleman’s lawyer, James Langdon, sent to the judges Monday in the former Minnesota senator’s election contest trial. The letter cites eight cases from other states in which courts found “the number of illegal votes exceeds the margin between the candidates.”

The Minnesota-bred Coen Brothers made a mock clean-coal ad for the Reality Coalition (via raw story):

Like Al Franken, Joel and Ethan Coen grew up in the Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park. People say, wow, something in the water? Actually, yeah: coal pollution.

Senate Majority Harry Reid is drawing a new line in the snow, naming a date by which he’s pledging to have Al Franken seated as Minnesota’s next senator: April Fool’s Day. Democrats will invoke the Senate’s privilege to seat members to the body regardless of where former Sen. Norm Coleman’s court battle stands at that [...]

The Al Franken-Norm Coleman Senate contest will be decided in the Minnesota Supreme Court, according to election law experts. But other factors could possibly have the outcome decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Testimony from a witness for Norm Coleman was stricken from the court record today when the three judges in Minnesota’s election contest trial agreed with Al Franken’s side that Coleman lawyers should not have shared notes with her during a break. As seen and reported on The UpTake, it was a dramatic blow for Coleman’s [...]

When Al Franken started putting “Sen.-elect,” before his name, former Sen. Norm Coleman’s spokesman Mark Drake responded by calling it a “joke,” and staffer Luke Friedrich followed it up by claiming Franken was merely “pretending to be a Senator before we know who really won.” I’m curious, then, what the pair have to say about [...]

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 [...]