By PAT DOYLE and KEVIN DUCHSCHERE,
Minneapolis Star Tribune
February 10, 2009
In a move to "streamline" a trial often bogged down in tedious testimony, the three judges overseeing Minnesota's U.S. Senate court battle on Tuesday asked Norm Coleman and Al Franken whether entire categories of rejected absentee ballots should be reconsidered or set aside once and for all.
Should a ballot be barred if it went to the wrong precinct? Should a ballot be excluded if cast by a non-registered voter? And what about an unsigned ballot where the instructions for signing were obstructed by a pre-printed address sticker?
Those are among 19 questions that District Judges Elizabeth Hayden, Kurt Marben and Denise Reilly want lawyers for Coleman and Franken to answer this week in a major development in a dispute over thousands of ballots that one side or the other wants counted.
(More here.)
Two comments.
ReplyDelete#1. A group of Coleman voters have also filed suit and I expect the judges will evaluate their claims based on the same criteria thus Coleman should also pick up some votes.
#2. Of more interest is that the legal teams have responded to the judges 19 questions. I read the filings this morning and IMO Franken's team offered the better argument. A hearing was held today and Eric Black wrote afterward that Hennepin County Judge Denise Reilly especially seemed skeptical of Coleman's arguments.
In the legal teams responses, they only agree on four questions.
#3 (no notary seal);
#10 (no signature on registration form included with ballot)
#15 (ballot delivered late by agent)
#18 (no registration, not caused by official error)
The agreement is to reject the ballots.
Interestingly, they agree that the Notary Seal is required.
According to Coleman’s team, “Although, neither that statute nor the language of 203B12, subd.2, requires that a witness who is a notary or who is authorized to administer oaths actually notarize the voter’s signature, it is reasonable to expect such a person to provide the standard evidence that he or she is in fact a notary. The absence of such is sufficient to rebut the presumption of trustworthiness afforded to the voter. The ballot should not be counted.”
Obviously, Coleman should have known that he is rejecting at least one of his voters. It begs the question, if he has reviewed all the ballots that fit this category and determined that Franken may have garnered more votes than he would. [ Eric Black offered the same assessment. ]
Secondly, Coleman misses the argument that the voter is being impacted beyond his control. For example, in some states a notary seal is not required to be applied if you are an attorney, therefore it may be a practice that the seal would not be used, hence the voter did nothing wrong but because the out-of-state attorney did not know that Coleman’s team would deny the ballot, the voter lost.
The wrong precinct question is most interesting also. As I recall, didn't Mark Dayton have a problem voting a couple of years ago because he went to the wrong precinct. Based on Coleman's argument, that should not be a problem ... which in essence would open up the voting process to the potential of mass confusion and rampent voter fraud.