The Minnesota election court today heard a series of contentious oral arguments, with the decisions likely to have a huge impact on the future of this case.
First up, let’s take a look at the Coleman campaign’s motion to declare that “Rule 9” — the set of procedures that the campaigns created for counting original damaged absentee ballots, rather than the duplicates made on Election Night — was illegal. The Coleman has maintained that human errors in the labeling of duplicates and originals resulted Franken gaining an illegitimate gain, that votes were counted twice.
Lead Coleman lawyer Joe Friedberg argued that the rule created by the Coleman campaign was illegal, overriding the interests of the voters, and pointed out how the Secretary of State’s office didn’t want to go along. “And the Secretary of State abdicated his function by allowing two political parties to set aside a statute that was not designed for their benefit in the first place,” he said. “You can’t do that.”
Friedberg turned to the evidence they’d presented: Statistical calculations about ten precincts in Minneapolis, the testimony of election officials that the mistakes involved are going to happen — and inevitably he had to address the matter of Pamela Howell, the one local precinct worker they brought in to discuss this. Howell’s credibility has already been seriously undermined because of the Coleman campaign’s misconduct, for which they were fined, in hiding her name and evidence from the Franken campaign — and she admitted on the stand that she’s sympathetic to Coleman.
Friedberg said we nevertheless have her story– and as I’ve reported, there is some truth to it — and asked the judges “whether this woman would create this out of whole cloth, and if she had as much riding on this that she would come in here” and commit perjury.
Franken lawyer David Lillehaug fired back, saying Friedberg was misrepresenting the facts. “Contestant’s counsel just argued that this was agreed to by the ‘political parties.’ No. That’s not right,” said Lillehaug. “This was an agreement between the Al Franken for Senate ’08 committee, and the Norm Coleman for Senate ’08 committee. In other words, contestants are bound by these agreements.”
And Lillehaug made a striking accusation: Coleman didn’t challenge this until the very end of the recount for a reason. The alleged reason was that pro-Coleman Wright County was the last county to finish recounting, and was especially full of duplicated ballots — and lo and behold, he’s not challenging any cases of double-counting in Wright. Thus, Coleman took down challenges and numbers on alleged double-counts in Democratic areas, and waited for the results to come in from Wright. “And then they added it up,” Lillehaug said, “and said, ‘Oh this didn’t work out quite the way we wanted it to. Maybe Rule 9 didn’t benefit us.”
Lillehaug’s case is that Rule 9 is legal, that Coleman cannot argue against it, and that evidence hasn’t been sufficiently presented for the precincts in question.
Afterwards, Friedberg specified the remedy he wants: To re-recount specified precincts, sans Rule 9, and to give the Franken camp the opportunity to play the same game in areas they pick out. We’ll see how this works out.
