We’re really now in crunch-time in Minnesota, with the court handing down one important ruling after another — and they just did it again.
The court has released a new order, co-signed with the consent of both sides’ lawyers, to deal with the problem of what have come to be known as “3-A” ballots — a category where a newly-registering absentee voter included their registration form inside the internal secrecy envelope containing the ballot, rather than immediately within the outer envelope as it was supposed to be done.
When the ballots arrived during the election, many counties rejected them because of a failure to register to vote. But other areas would open up those secrecy envelopes, with the election workers staying blind to the actual vote inside, and feel around for a registration card in order to help get that vote counted.
The court has now commanded the counties to open the ballots on a long list of potential 3-A’s — a little bit over 1,500 envelopes — to look for registration cards, and to organize a full listing of ballots with complete registrations, incomplete registrations or no form at all, and to get the job done by this Wednesday.
The ballots with valid registrations are not being counted yet — but this is the first step in getting there.
So who would stand to benefit from this?
We don’t know who would benefit, due to the lack of further knowledge about which ballots will actually get in, but there are some clues.
As I’ve observed before, it appears that Al Franken would be the more likely beneficiary of counting these. First of all, everyone would agree at this point that Franken won the total absentee ballots by roughly 8-10 points. Second, a newly-registering voter is often a first-time voter, and the exit poll showed Al winning that demographic 52%-34%. So this could be a Franken-leaning subset within what is already a Franken-leaning sample.
Furthermore, many of the counties who already included these votes during the election were deep-red areas, with Democratic areas potentially making up a disproportionate share of the total 3-A’s in existence. For example, over 20% of the list of ballots that the court has asked to have examined came from Ramsey County (St. Paul), which went for Franken 52%-34%, while Ramsey only made up less than 10% of the total statewide vote.
But again, this is all a gamble. We don’t know how many of the possible 3-A’s are actually valid 3-A’s with completed registration forms. After Wednesday, we might have a better idea of what the pool of unopened votes will look like.
