In the Minnesota trial today, lead Coleman lawyer Joe Friedberg made a very frank admission: The Coleman campaign made a mistake in personally rejecting a ballot they now want opened up and counted.
This all goes back to the state Supreme Court’s controversial decision for how to deal with wrongly-rejected ballots, which gave the campaigns a veto power over each individual ballot as the local officials sorted through them again back in December.
It has been repeatedly shown during this trial that the Coleman camp’s newer list of ballots that they say were wrongly thrown out — indeed, their Web page about the issue describes “the thousands of Minnesotans the Franken campaign is seeking to disenfranchise” — includes multiple votes that their own campaign specifically vetoed before.
But now Friedberg said of one particular ballot: “We made a horrendous error by challenging it, and I assume you would agree.” After some more back and forth, he added: “But just so it’s to be understood, we want the ballot to be opened and counted.”
As I’ve previously pointed out, the Republican Party’s phone calls to check how people voted, and to select them for inclusion as Coleman witnesses, didn’t happen until after the vetoing process. So Team Coleman was missing data at the time for how some people had voted.
Also during the trial today, Franken lawyer David Lillehaug revisited the case of Peter DeMuth, a Coleman-voter whose ballot was rejected because he’d used his computer to “sign” his initials on the absentee ballot application, then later put his true signature on the ballot envelope in the old-fashioned way. During his testimony, DeMuth said he did this because he didn’t want to pay money to print out a copy of the application at his college.
“Do you know how much it costs to print a piece of paper at North Dakota State University?” Lillehaug rhetorically asked state Elections Director Gary Poser. Obviously, Poser didn’t know the answer, so Lillehaug produced it: “It’s 3 cents a page, after you exhaust 500 pages.”
Lillehaug then asked Coleman’s lawyers if they would stipulate to this fact. They did, but Lillehaug made sure to add that he has a copy of the university’s printing policy, and is declining to formally introduce it into evidence because of Coleman’s stipulation.
