Today’s developments in the Minnesota election trial make even clearer the extent to which the Coleman team are casting doubt on the whole election result — indeed, they’re using the sort of language that could lead one to believe they’ll try for a do-over.
At Coleman lawyer/spokesman Ben Ginsberg’s post-court press conference today (c/o The Uptake), unveiled this new line: “You saw today in the testimony of Scott and Carver counties, why Al Franken’s current lead — and I use that term euphemistically — is based on illegal votes.”
Ginsberg also said that the variation across the state in how absentee ballots were screened for acceptance or rejection made this “a fatally-flawed election.”
The Coleman legal team used this afternoon’s examination of two county election managers, Kendra Olson of Carver County and Mary Kay Kes of Scott County, to explore their this-whole-election-is-a-disaster gambit again. Olson testified that she tried to be forgiving with some of the rules for accepting or rejecting absentee ballots — but not all.
Meanwhile, Scott County elections manager Mary Kay Kes said her county didn’t even check on a particular voter error that led Olson to keep out 181 ballots — what the Coleman camp claims is an inconsistency in treating ballots that rises to being a Constitutional violation.
Thus, Ginsberg said, there are votes already in the system that under the court’s recent ruling — which forbade Coleman from asking for some ballots to be counted — are to be considered invalidly cast.
So the Coleman camp appears to be setting up a choice for this court or any future appeals: Either count all these rejected ballots, under Coleman’s novel Equal Protection claim, or we’ll insist that this whole election was illegal and demand a mulligan.
Come to think of it, they could still claim that the election was illegal if those ballots are all counted, and Norm is behind.
(By the way, here’s a fun fact: Carver County, which has supposedly given Al Franken all these illegal votes, actually voted for Norm Coleman by 55%-29%, and Scott went for Coleman by 51%-31%. Even taking into account Franken’s statewide lead in absentee ballots, Coleman could have won them here.)
