Coleman Lawyer: It’s The Dems’ Fault That Minnesota Has One Senator

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In a press conference just now, Coleman lawyer Ben Ginsberg made an interesting declaration: The fact that the Minnesota Senate seat is now empty, depriving the state of full representation, is the Democrats’ fault.

Ginsberg was lambasting the Franken campaign’s lawsuit to force the state to issue Franken a certificate of election — which will be argued at the state Supreme Court tomorrow — as an undemocratic attempt seize the seat, charging that the Franken team know they will lose when all the votes are counted.

When asked by a reporter about the problem of Minnesotans being under-represented Ginsberg explained that there is a constitutional solution to this impasse: Having the Senate declare the seat officially vacant, empowering the governor to make an appointment to the seat. “They don’t want to do that because the governor is a Republican,” Ginsberg said.

It should be pointed out that Minnesota law currently empowers the governor to make an appointment to a vacant Senate seat, with no special election until the next cycle — that is, November 2010.

Another funny moment today from the Coleman team: Many people immediately suspect that they have cherry-picked their pool of 4,797 rejected absentee ballots that they’ll be arguing for. And there is quite a bit of evidence for that.

But it turns out that one person on the list is Noah Kunin, a reporter for the Minnesota news site The Uptake, which has been actively cataloguing this whole train wreck of an election. Kunin reports that he was not contacted by the GOP — he only just found out today when he himself checked the list on the Coleman campaign’s Web site, and it turned out his name was misspelled in the Coleman list, though Kunin said his name is spelled properly in his town’s database and this was not the reason he was rejected.

Kunin is not disclosing whom he voted for. But it should be noted that the state GOP doesn’t like The Uptake, and has been routinely attacking the site and calling them a biased, pro-Franken liberal outlet. Again, Kunin was not screened by the Coleman camp — chances are they didn’t even realize who he was when they put him on the list, but if they had known then they might not have selected him.

(Special thanks to the Uptake for carrying Ginsberg’s presser.)

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