ELIZABETH DUNBAR AND PATRICK CONDON
WashPost
February 13, 2009
ST. PAUL, Minn. — The judges in Minnesota's U.S. Senate trial said in a preliminary ruling Friday that Republican Norm Coleman has not yet shown a widespread problem with absentee voters being denied the right to vote.
The three-judge panel ordered that rejected absentee ballots from 12 of 19 categories should not be counted in the Senate race. Coleman, who is trying to undo Democrat Al Franken's 225-vote lead, had wanted to count ballots in all but three of the categories.
Coleman had argued that thousands of rejected absentee ballots were excluded inconsistently and should be counted, but Friday's ruling would limit the total number of ballots to be reviewed for counting.
"The facts presented thus far do not show a wholesale disenfranchisement of absentee voters in the 2008 general election," wrote judges Elizabeth Hayden, Kurt Marben and Denise Reilly.
Coleman's lawyers argued that as many as 4,800 rejected absentee ballots should be counted in the race. It was not immediately clear how many are now off-limits because of the judges' order, but the judges had signaled it may not be a very large number.
(More here.)
I read the judges’ ruling last night and you have to be impressed by the methodology and reasoning that the Appellate Court is using.
ReplyDeleteThe judges’ rulings will make it hard for a successful appeal to the MN Supreme Court and/or the US Supreme Court. So, the time that is spent now, will actually prevent further delays later on (unless Coleman prevails).
His case has featured “girlfriends who signed documents” and “jailbirds” as examples of voters whose ballots were rejected … and the court’s opinion seemed to follow the old adage “ignorance of the law is no excuse” citing that it is a privilege to vote via absentee ballot, thus the voter must follow the law … and they haven’t.
Thus far, the court has adhered to a state law and case precedent ... which is not helping Coleman who would like to see an "activist" court that would overstep the legislative authority and allow in ballots where voters did not follow procedures. In the slanted blog world, the talk is of “overcounted” or missing ballots, but the trial has been based on expanding the field of absentee ballots because Coleman knows that even if the “overcount” and missing ballots are considered, that he cannot overcome Franken’s lead.
Monday starts a new day with a shrunken pool of ballots to be debated. The question is : can Coleman obtain affidavits from enough voters affirming that they signed both the application and the absentee ballot envelope while adhering to every other requirement to use the absentee ballot procedure ? Remember, as the Contestee in this proceeding, Coleman is offering his twisted version of the voter pool …. If Coleman is sucessful in overcoming the Franken lead, then Franken will go back over “his” voters in the pool and request that they be considered also.
Coleman’s camp can try and spin this but as I read the briefs and the judges rulings, they seemed to side with Franken’s arguments.