The Minnesota election court just heard arguments on Norm Coleman’s motion to declare illegal ballots that he had previously agreed were legal, and boy was it tense.
The Coleman camp sent up James Langdon, the member of the team who has best come across as sympathetic and sincere. “We understand that we stipulated, and we take that very seriously,” Langdon said. “However, our research told us we could not stipulate to make something legal that was in fact illegal.”
The claim here is that the court has ruled that only strict standards will be applied in letting in any new ballots. But some of those 933 previously-rejected ballots that were counted on January 3 wouldn’t pass this test. Therefore, the Coleman camp says, these ballots must be culled, tying the ballot itself to the original envelope for potential un-counting.
Langdon went even further and said that the Coleman campaign has filed a motion to apply the court’s standards to all absentee ballots that have already been counted — that is, the absentees from Election Night.
This contains an obvious problem: All those previous absentees were de-coupled from their envelopes on Election Night.
So the Coleman camp is now attempting to create a legal trap for the court: Undo the February 13th ruling and let in all those votes we want, or we will insist that the result is illegal.
And really, even if those other voters are let in, the Coleman camp might turn around and still insist that the whole count is illegal.
The Franken camp sent up David Lillehaug — whose distinction among the Franken team is how effectively he does anger.
Lillehaug tore into Langdon’s “however” clause: “There is no ‘however’ with stipulations of this sort.”
“The parties — at least one party — worked in good faith to reach this stipulation,” he later said. Moreover, he added, both parties had told the court that they had worked together, had agreed that these ballots were legal, and dismissed any and all claims related to them with prejudice.
Lillehaug declared that in any court, you can’t scrap a settlement you entered into: “It doesn’t matter whether you’re in small claims court, or conciliation — or whether you’re a former United States Senator.”
“I think I know what’s going on here, and I’m not gonna say very much about it,” said Lillehaug. “But this is the next step in an attack on the integrity of Minnesota’s election system, and a step in attacking the legitimacy of this proceeding.”
Langdon got up again to take questions, and defended his honor: “I want this court to know that this stipulation was entered into in the utmost good faith, and that this motion was brought in the utmost good faith as well. I resent Mr. Lillehaug’s implications, they are not true.”
Finally, responding to Judge Kurt Marben, Langdon said that the Coleman camp really believe that the ballots should all be counted — but their position is now that the court’s strict standard should be applied retroactively, across all absentees.
