You get the feeling that Norm Coleman’s legal team really doesn’t like the appearance of having spent five weeks in court to get more of their own ballots counted, in the name of enfranchising all voters, and now having to watch the Franken attorneys take a turn at bat.
In court just before, Franken lawyer Kevin Hamilton was going over some rejected absentee ballots with Jeffrey Cox, the elections director for the Democratic stronghold of Duluth. On one envelope, Hamilton asked if the ballot had been rejected by the Coleman campaign, under the state Supreme Court’s controversial decision to give each campaign a veto power over individual ballot envelopes during the review this past December.
At this point, Team Coleman objected to Hamilton’s attempt to establish this, based on the forms in front of him.
“I’ll take that back,” Hamilton said. “All we know here is that someone named Frederick Knaak signed the rejection form, correct?”
Frederick “Fritz” Knaak is one of Norm Coleman’s lawyers, and actually headed up his effort during the recount proper. Apparently, Team Coleman doesn’t want it to be aired out that they’d personally stopped individual ballots from being counted.
Hamilton later asked Cox if a ballot should be counted. At that point, lead Coleman lawyer Joe Friedberg objected. Hamilton then pointed out that Friedberg had spent five weeks asking local election officials if ballots he’d picked out should be counted. Hamilton then continued asking the question, with just a slight modification in his phrasing to make it clear that he was asking for Cox’s individual, professional judgment.
Also, Coleman spokesman Ben Ginsberg really upped the rhetoric at his afternoon press conference, giving his rebuttals to Team Franken an expressly partisan tone today.
Ginsberg insisted that the Franken camp’s math — which alleges that Coleman has only offered complete and valid evidence on perhaps 20 rejected absentee ballots — is all wrong, and the number of viable cases is really in the low thousands.
“Well, having heard Mr. Elias’ version of the math in this case, I think I really do have a greater insight into how the Democrats in Washington have passed a $798 billion bailout bill, a $3 trillion budget, and now plan on telling us they’re shrinking the deficit at the same time,” Ginsberg said. “And so the fuzzy math of Washington seems to have winded its way here to Minnesota.”
In other words, you can’t trust the Franken lawyers’ arguments because they’re a bunch of dishonest, shifty Democrats.
