In addition to this morning’s fireworks in the Minnesota courtroom, the court also just heard arguments on a very interesting motion from Team Coleman: That the court must take their ruling from two weeks ago to apply strict standards for letting in new ballots, and apply it retroactively to all the absentee ballots that were let in on Election Night.
The obvious problem here: There is no way to directly subtract votes, because the envelopes and the ballots were de-coupled on Election Night, and there is no way to reunite them.
Coleman lawyer James Langdon suggested a possible remedy — though he’s not advocating this yet — would be to do a pro-rata reduction. That would be to take the number of invalid ballot envelopes, and proportionately deduct votes from each candidate according to the county or precinct results. Later on, he was even clearer in saying this was the only remedy.
Langdon — who disliked the strict-standards ruling ever since it came out — said the campaign didn’t really want to do it. “We would still prefer to have the obverse, to have the standard that was applied on Election Night,” said Langdon, “which the evidence has demonstrated is a substantial compliance standard, which was applied differently from county to county.”
Langdon said this comes down to both Equal Protection under the 14th Amendment, and the basic statutory definition itself: “At the end of the day the court is left with a conundrum as to how it can issue a judgment saying who got the highest number of legally-cast ballots.”
Judge Denise Reilly later told Langdon that she couldn’t find any previous instance in Minnesota cases of a reduction being performed. Langdon said he had seen one, and could get back to her with the citation.
In short, Team Coleman is playing a legal game of chicken with the judges, trying to get them to reverse that earlier ruling, and to otherwise muddy the waters.
Franken lawyer Marc Elias said that Team Coleman’s real goal was to cast doubt on the entire election result and declare that we can’t know what really happened, which they had denied earlier in the case.
“If Mr. Langdon believes that this court cannot determine who received the most legally-cast votes, then this court should dismiss his complaints” Elias said, and send the dispute to the United States Senate.
Elias said this new request has no basis in law — and that it’s an out-of-order last-minute surprise request by Coleman. “Pro-rata reduction? Where in the contest statute is pro-rata reduction? Where in their pleadings is pro-rata reduction?” he asked. “Pro-rata reduction on a statewide basis? On a county basis, on a precinct basis, on a sub-precinct basis? Targeted on a cherry-picked basis from their voter file they’ve used for the rest of their pleadings?”
