Republican nominee Tom Emmer has now withdrawn almost all of his campaign’s challenges of ballots in Minnesota’s gubernatorial recount.
As the Star Tribune reports, Emmer had about 650 challenges remaining, going into today. By today’s deadline of noon Central Time, his campaign had cut that down to a mere 131 challenges. The board will meet tomorrow to adjudicate the remaining challenges from Emmer, as well the challenges from Democratic nominee Mark Dayton.
This follows his campaign’s actions over last weekend, when they withdrew over 2,500 challenges in heavily Democratic Hennepin County (Minneapolis), which the local officials at the counting tables had deemed to be frivolous.
Emmer lead attorney Eric Magnsuon — a former state Chief Justice who previously served on the Canvassing Board that oversaw the 2008 Senate recount — wrote in a letter to the board: “Emmer table representatives cast a wide net in order to ensure that no valid challenges were lost; once counsel were able to review those challenges, we applied our broader perspective and made reasoned decisions regarding whether or not to pursue particular challenges.”
Some key context here is that at Friday’s State Canvassing Board meeting, state Supreme Court Justice Paul Anderson reminded Magnuson of the notes that Magnuson had kept on the 2008 board — which came to be popularly known as the “hieroglyphics” — showing what guidelines Magnuson and the other board members had arrived at to decide the disputed votes.
Magnuson carefully said that those were only the records of that board, and were not binding upon this one. But the message was clear — Anderson was warning Magnuson to treat the goalposts seriously.
Going into the recount, Democratic nominee Mark Dayton led by 8,770 votes, or 0.42%. While this is within the 0.5% needed to trigger a statewide recount, many observers had doubted that Emmer could pull ahead, as Dayton’s lead was probably too wide to be reversed in light of the experience from 2008. However, a possible drawn-out legal contest could potentially result in Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty staying in office in the interim, with the opportunity to work with a newly elected Republican legislature
