Sometimes you have to wonder if there’s a method to the madness of Joe Friedberg, Norm Coleman’s top lawyer — or whether he’s just plain mad.
Each side has raised concerns about precincts where fewer ballots ended up getting tallied during the recount than were recorded as cast on election night. The reason why is a bit complicated, but it has to do with how the campaigns and election officials dealt with damaged absentee ballots that had been duplicated — and which the Coleman campaign wants to undo in places where it hurt him.
Naturally, both campaigns have focused on precincts where the loss of votes created a net “gain” for the other guy, in protest of what seems like an obvious disenfranchisement — though as the Franken campaign notes, it was under a set of rules that everyone agreed to going in, and it cut both ways.
Friedberg had a very odd alternative explanation for a precinct that created a net gain of four votes for Coleman. “Well,” he asked Dakota County elections manager Kevin Boyle, “Couldn’t a dishonest person have picked up 24 ballots, run them through the machine, and then made them disappear?”
“It seems unlikely,” said Boyle. “But I suppose that is possible.”
“Well, I assure you that I’m not assuming there are a lot of dishonest people running around Dakota County — not more than anywhere else,” said Friedberg. “But there are a lot of dishonest people out there, yes?”
So here’s Friedberg’s alternative explanation: A dishonest election worker could have stuffed the ballot box on Election Day, thinking they would never get caught — and then gone into the voting machine and destroyed the additional 24 ballots right after doing this, just to make sure.
Friedberg did add, though, that he wasn’t directly accusing anybody of anything — only posing the scenario.
Franken lawyer David Lillehaug later revisited this:
Lillehaug: And under that hypothetical, the person would have to cast eight ballots for Coleman, 12 ballots for Franken, and four ballots for someone else, correct?
Boyle: Yes.
Lillehaug: Does that sound very likely to you, sir?
Boyle: It sounds highly unlikely.
