Some news out of the Minnesota trial: The Coleman legal team has now dropped another complaint from their lawsuit against the election results.
The Coleman campaign has let go of a complaint alleging that some of the 933 previously-rejected absentee ballots that were opened up on January 3 — after both campaigns sorted through the envelopes and agreed that they were legally cast, and had been improperly tossed because of clerical errors — were not in fact legally cast, and shouldn’t have been counted.
To be blunt, this was perhaps the single worst gambit that Coleman was trying to make. Remember that all of these envelopes were declared by his own campaign to have been legally cast — but once they were opened and revealed to have gone for Al Franken by a 176-vote margin, they suddenly became illegal and had to be picked through for potential rejection.
The Coleman team probably realized two important things. First, this complaint had no chance of winning. And second, having this claim still out there was undercutting their current drive to open up even more rejected absentees, even in cases where a lighter standard would be needed to forgive obvious voter errors. So they’re now stipulating that the votes were legit.
