Tony Trimble

Gov. Pawlenty’s new Freedom First political action committee held its first local fundraiser tonight at the Hilton Hotel in downtown Minneapolis. About 250 people — the same size crowd Pawlenty drew at the PAC’s considerably more affordable pretzel reception in Washington, D.C. last month – paid $1,000 each to attend a reception on the hotel’s third [...]

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 [...]

Al Franken has emerged from the Senate recount with a 225-vote lead over incumbent Norm Coleman. The five-member State Canvassing Board unanimously certified the results at a hearing Monday afternoon. Nearly two months after the election, and following a painstaking statewide manual recount of nearly three million ballots, Franken received 1,212,431 votes, while Coleman earned 1,212,206.

Norm Coleman’s attorneys vowed to go to court to make up the ground the incumbent Republican lost today after more than 900 absentee ballots that had been mistakenly rejected were tallied, increasing Democratic challenger Al Franken’s lead for Coleman’s U.S. Senate seat to 225. “We’ll take whatever legal action … to remedy this artificial lead,” said Coleman recount attorney Fritz Knaak.

“I’ve had better days,” Knaak conceded. “The numbers are what they are.” But he repeated that the “process was broken” and predicted that “the election will still be called in Coleman’s favor.”

Minnesota’s U.S. Senate recount has ratcheted up since Election Day to become an inscrutable form of inside baseball. But Tuesday’s proceedings of the State Canvassing Board made even baseball seem easy. Pitchers adjust their pitches based on the umpires’ first few calls, while the first day’s decisions on challenged ballots went by before campaigns began to adjust to the board’s way of ruling. Now both sides are mixing up their pitches like baseball aces, adding and subtracting from their challenged-ballot piles.

The final step in the statewide manual recount of the U.S. Senate race is underway. Shortly after noon, the five-member canvassing board began examining the roughly 1,500 ballots that have been challenged by the campaigns of Sen. Norm Coleman and Al Franken.