The Coleman legal team is continuing to lay out their case that they want the question of rejected absentee ballots to be opened again — and in some cases, to literally open the ballots to investigate.
Coleman lawyer Joe Friedberg has been questioning Washington County (Stillwater) elections official Kevin Corbid, and has been asking him about what have come to be known as “3A” ballots — a category where a newly-registered absentee voter included their registration card inside the internal secrecy envelope containing the ballot, rather than immediately inside the outer envelope as it was supposed to be done.
Election officials now believe that 3A ballots should be considered to have been legally cast. The problem here is how one identifies a 3A ballot.
Friedberg asked Corbid if it would be possible to have someone open up the secrecy envelopes — blind to the content of the vote inside — and find out if there’s another card in there. Corbid suspected that some precincts on Election Day might have already done this, giving the voter the benefit of the doubt, while others did not.
“If you were given a directive now on how to do it,” Friedberg asked, “how long would it take you to take that class of ballots, open them and see if there’s registration materials in there?”
“You know, without having the list in front of me, our subset is fairly small,” said Corbid. “I think it would be an hour or two at most.”
The whole question of improperly-rejected absentee ballots originated when the Franken campaign was complaining about votes having been tossed because of administrative error, a fight that Coleman was initially opposing. Now that Coleman is behind, he’s not only taken up that fight but has also been going one step further — championing ballots that were rejected because of voter error.
