The Minnesota Independent stopped by the PAC’s swanky reception and saw one friendly face wandering through the crowd: Tony Trimble, familiar from his months of service as recount attorney to former U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman.

Trimble cut a slightly more rumpled figure than the Freedom Firsters around him dressed mostly in crisply glamorous black attire.

Standing alone were several banks of computer monitors displaying the Freedom First web site.

Polinaut has audio of Pawlenty’s dinner speech.

Photo via The UpTake

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 effort to upend his Democratic opponent’s 225-vote recount victory in the fight for Coleman’s old U.S. Senate seat, especially for a team still smarting from other smackdowns Tuesday.

UPDATE: The judges changed their minds and un-struck the testimony (pdf). (They all three signed the order  – does that make three un-strikes?)

Minneapolis election worker Pamela Howell, a Republican, was on the witness stand today to attest to polling place errors that could have led to double-counting of votes. She was under cross-examination by the Franken side when the court adjourned for a short break — during which Coleman attorney Joe Friedberg gave her notes she’d prepared earlier.

When court resumed, Franken attorney David Lillehaug  first demanded to know what the document was and the reason it hadn’t been shared with his team — and then demanded that the court strike Howell’s testimony from the record.

Coleman attorney Tony Trimble’s explanation of the incident as a simple mistake didn’t satisfy the judges. Instead, they had Howell leave the stand having left not an official ripple on the proceedings — though her brief appearance had crashed like an unwelcome wave across the former Republican senator’s deck.

In other court action today, Coleman attorneys argued that a St. Louis County absentee ballot envelope rife with X marks where voter information belonged should not have been counted. The two sides clashed over whether Coleman could solicit evidence from far-flung counties via e-mail. And Cindy Reichert, the Minneapolis elections manager, took the stand later in the day to be quizzed about 133 ballots that went from the city’s Ward 3, Precinct 3. She also said some absentee ballots that may contain registration forms inside remain unopened. Her testimony resumes Thursday.

On Tuesday, Coleman continued to lose ground in his effort to have some ballots counted and others not. And at the end of the day, the court issued an order (pdf) rejecting his request for an injunction to stop state officials from blotting out marks linking 933 ballots tallied in the recount, some of which Coleman now contends aren’t legal.

The interminable quality of the back-and-forth legal battle, now in its fifth week, isn’t lost on the combatants closest to the conflict. An end-of-day interview by The UpTake’s Noah Kunin with East Coast-based Franken attorney Marc Elias included this exchange, after Coleman attorney Joel Friedberg, a Minnesotan, passed the pair in a courthouse corridor:

KUNIN (relaying a question from Elias’ wife, who Elias has said is following the trial via The UpTake “religiously”): When are you coming home, or is that too speculative?

ELIAS: You should have asked Mr. Friedberg. (Turning to shout down the hall) When am I going home?

FRIEDBERG (in an off-mike remark, as relayed by Kunin): The sooner, the better.

Al Franken has emerged from the U.S. 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. Roughly two months after the election — and following a painstaking statewide manual recount of nearly 3 million ballots — Franken received 1,212,431 votes, while Coleman was backed by 1,212,206 voters.

While the actions of the canvassing board would seem to suggest that the epic election contest is finally drawing to a close, the Coleman campaign immediately made it clear that they have no intention of conceding defeat. Attorney Tony Trimble announced at a press conference following the canvassing board meeting that they will file a lawsuit contesting the outcome of the contest. The Republican’s campaign believes that various voting improprieties — wrongly rejected absentee ballots, double-counted ballots and lost ballots — have tarnished the recount.

“Since the process is far from complete there can be no confidence in the current results of the United States Senate recount,” Trimble said. “We will file a contest within the next 24 hours to promptly correct those problems.”

The Franken campaign, not surprisingly, hailed the development. “Today is a great day for the people of Minnesota,” lawyer Marc Elias said. “I stand before you proudly as the attorney for the next Senator for the state, Senator-elect Al Franken;”

Franken himself declared victory in front of his Minneapolis condominium this afternoon. Reports out of Washington today suggested that the Senate will attempt to seat him tomorrow with the other freshman legislators. Republicans have vowed to prevent that from happening through a filibuster. In another unwelcome development for Coleman, his office was ordered shut and staff sent home at the direction of the Senate rules committee.

Secretary of State Mark Ritchie and the four other members of the canvassing board expressed satisfaction at the conduct of the state-mandated recount. “I think this recount has proven the wisdom and the strength of that system in an amazing way,” Ritchie said at the close of the meeting. “This didn’t just fall from the sky. People long before us built this system.”

But canvassing board member Eric Magnuson, chief justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court, summed up the continuing ambiguity surrounding the ultimate outcome of the Senate contest. “I don’t think we’ve written the last chapter in this particular election,” he said.

“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.”

That will happen, Coleman attorney Tony Trimble said, when hundreds of absentee ballots that the campaign still wants reviewed are opened and counted. “We’re still trying to ferret out for counting these 600 ballots,” he said, adding that fixing more than 100 allegedly double-counted ballots in Minneapolis would help Coleman as well.

Secretary of State Mark Ritchie said he expected that the State Canvassing Board would declare a result of the election on Monday — a result that seems all but certain to favor Franken.

“I’m also not happy that the two campaigns had the right to veto” once-rejected absentee ballots that local officials, on review, determined should be counted — referring to a controversial Dec. 18 state Supreme Court ruling that only absentee ballots that election officials and campaign representatives could agree upon should be counted.

Pitchers can adjust their pitches based on the umpires’ first few calls. The campaigns of Democrat Al Franken and U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman sat through about 160 of the board’s rulings Tuesday before signaling that they’d be adjusting their piles of challenged ballots accordingly.

“I sure hope that if you’re adding them, you’re also subtracting them,” said Ramsey County District Judge Edward Cleary.

U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman’s attorney, Tony Trimble, told reporters after the Tuesday meeting, which kicked off four days of meetings by the board, that the campaign would return “200-some” to its ballot-challenge pile, but also would remove some others. “We’ve restored challenges … simply because the board has now indicated how they rule on several different types of marking,” Trimble said. “And with that, of course, we have to adjust.”

On Wednesday morning, the Canvassing Board’s proceedings took the air of a baseball game in which both sides were settling in. Democrat Al Franken’s 80 additional withdrawals were much in evidence as the board sped through ballots the campaign had challenged in Minneapolis, including many dispatched within seconds of a cry of “withdrawn” from the Franken bench.

“Thank you. It’s wonderful to get withdrawals,” Ritchie remarked Wednesday morning after Franken forces withdrew another ballot as it came up before the board.

It wasn’t clear how late additions and subtractions affected the combined number of challenged ballots the board must work through this week. “We’re still south of 1,000,” Trimble promised, in the geographic-numerical nomenclature the Coleman camp has adopted, despite subtle suggestions of the American South — Florida, to be specific.

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.

The process started orderly enough, with the board unanimously rejecting the first of 441 contested ballots put forth by the Franken campaign. Chief Ramsey County Judge Kathleen Gearin then offered a sentiment likely shared by her fellow canvassing board members. “Can I just say it felt real good to get started on this?” she observed.

By the end of the first hour, when the panel took a break, Coleman had picked up 17 votes while Franken had gained 4. Those numbers are not likely reflective of any trend, however, since all of the challenges considered were from the Democrat’s campaign, meaning they are more likely to accrue in the Republican’s favor.

There were signs that the process will not be without turbulence. An early ballot (pictured) considered by the canvassing board displayed a mark in between the spaces allocated for Coleman and Independence Party candidate Dean Barkley. Local election officials had initially determined that it was a vote for Coleman. The panel, however, split on their appraisal of the voter’s intent, ultimately ruling that it should count for neither candidate — a loss for the Republican.

Before the canvassing board began inspecting the contested ballots, attorneys for each campaign were given five minutes to address the panel. Tony Trimble, representing the Coleman side, expressed concern that in some cases both original and duplicate ballots may have been included in the recount, meaning that the vote would have been tallied twice. “We now face a situation of double votes,” Trimble said. “This has occurred in at least 137 precincts that we are aware of.”

Marc Elias (pictured), representing the Franken campaign, pooh-poohed the possibility that some votes have been double counted. Instead he suggested that the Republicans are now trying to change the rules of the recount. “Those were the rules that we were given, and neither party objected to those rules that we were given,” he said. “It seems to me that today … is a bit late in the process for us to now say these rules which the Secretary of State set forth need to now be the subject of a intensive audited review.”

The canvassing board didn’t immediately act on the issue of purportedly double-counted ballots, punting that discussion to a later time. They then began the painstaking process of examining the contested ballots. The panel is expected to continue this process through at least 5 p.m. today and hopes to conclude it by Friday.