Coleman spokesman/lawyer Ben Ginsberg is really stepping up the rhetoric about how the entire vote count in Minnesota is tainted and unreliable — and he is quite conspicuously not ruling out the idea of asking for a do-over election.
Ginsberg just held a dramatic press conference in the hallway of the court building, with six easels containing photocopies of absentee ballot envelopes that were already accepted and counted on Election Night. Ginsberg said he had 300 examples of ballots from St. Louis County (Duluth), a Democratic stronghold, where the voters clearly didn’t follow instructions and the ballots should not have been accepted.
Ginsberg said this didn’t just impugn the reliability of the recount — it showed the illegality of Election Night totals, too, with the number of illegal votes far greater than the “erstwhile margin” of the race: “It also means with this sort of overwhelming evidence that were the court to certify the Election Night results they would be including illegal votes. And the court’s charge is to count legal votes, and that would be a clear contradiction.”
Ginsberg continued attacking the court’s “Friday the 13th Ruling” against the lenient standards that Coleman wanted for admitting additional rejected ballots, saying this was irreconcilable with the count as it already is — and even some of the ballots behind him wouldn’t have met the proposed lenient standards: “The court has now created a muddle of its own making, and that is what it has to sort out.”
Ginsberg acknowledged one simple fact — these votes can’t be un-counted, because they were de-coupled from their envelopes on Election Night. “Listen, I don’t know what you do at this point with this number of votes from one county that are clearly illegal and are clearly in the count,” he said. “I don’t know how you physically take them out. It’s a monumental problem that’s as plain as the charts standing in back of me now. And it’s the court’s job to straighten them out.”
Indeed, he later added that since the court’s job is to certify the number of legally cast ballots, and that “you can’t do that with any degree of confidence — with no degree of confidence.” And he acknowledged that these problems probably happened in every election across the country, and we only notice it when it’s this close — but that doesn’t mean you can ignore it.
One reporter asked point blank if Ginsberg was looking for a re-vote. “That is for the court. The court has that mandate,” he said. “And I’m not gonna prejudge what the court should do. But the court has the responsibility to reconcile these issues.”
(Ginsberg press conference c/o The Uptake.)
