▲ What elected official set the table for both the 1962 and 2008 recounts by backing out of or losing a race?

▲ How does the name Freeman figure into the 1962 and 2008 recounts?

▲ What are two echoes in 2008 of the Highway 35 scandal in 1962?

Answers after the jump. Answers:

▲ Walter Mondale. As Minnesota’s young attorney general in 1962, his decision not to pursue the DFL endorsement for governor left the field open for eventual winner Karl Rolvaag. And in 2002, Mondale’s unsuccessful last-minute candidacy as a fill-in for the late U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone set the stage for Republican Norm Coleman to seek re-election to the seat in 2008.

▲ Gov. Orville Freeman lost to Republican State Sen. Elmer Andersen in 1960, setting up the 1962 contest between Rolvaag and Anderson. In 2008, Mike Freeman, Orville Freeman’s son, used his position as Hennepin County attorney to propose that local officials sort rejected absentee ballots so as to create a so-called “fifth pile” of ballots that had been wrongly rejected.

▲ The I-35W bridge collapse in 2007 and reconstruction in 2008 occurred on the same highway that was the subject of a scandal that broke just before the 1962 election concerning construction costs, possibly hurting Andersen. The 2008 election had its own last-minute scandal involving lawsuits filed in Texas and Delaware that alleged that businessman Nasser Kazeminy had funneled money to Coleman via Coleman’s wife’s job. That scandal may have hurt the Coleman vote.