Franken Team Gets Election Official To Undermine Key Coleman Claim

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The Franken legal team has worked today to score some more goals against the Coleman case, watering down a key point that Norm has tried to make.

Franken lawyer David Lillehaug reviewed one particular precinct in Coleman’s argument that some absentee votes were double-counted, illegitimately benefiting Al Franken, as a result of damaged ballots being copied and certain copies not being labeled properly.

Dakota County elections manager Kevin Boyle confirmed what the county’s position is on this: They believe there was no double-counting here. They say that the apparent additional duplicated ballots are from votes that weren’t counted to begin with on Election Night, and were only tabulated during the recount.

Coleman needs the double-counting be a simple issue, one that can be easily calculated and then corrected by just subtracting excess votes from the spreadsheet. But if the local officials insist it didn’t happen in one case or another, the burden of proof goes up significantly — if we can’t definitively cite which individual votes were double-counted, this suddenly starts to look like an effort to simply chop off Franken votes by fiat.

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