Coleman Wants To Count Votes Previously Thrown Out — By Himself

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In the Minnesota election court this afternoon, Franken lawyer Kevin Hamilton continued to demonstrate how the Coleman campaign is now working to get ballots put into the count, that they previously insisted were not legal votes.

Hamilton reviewed a particular ballot that had been shown earlier to Anoka County elections manager Rachel Smith, for which the Coleman campaign is arguing that it shouldn’t have been excluded simply because the voter signed the envelope in the wrong place.

Smith herself had changed her mind on this issue when reviewing the rejected ballots this past December, and she submitted it to the campaigns for further review. It turned out it was objected to by a campaign, though Smith couldn’t remember which one, keeping it out of the count.

Hamilton got out the form submitted by the campaign that vetoed it — the Coleman campaign, objecting that the signature had been put on the wrong line.

Hamilton then went over several more examples of ballots that had been vetoed by the Coleman campaign back in December, and which they are now saying should be counted.

This all gets into the related legal doctrines of estoppel and invited error, which the Franken campaign has been attempting to use to drag down Coleman’s whole case — essentially arguing that coleman is not allowed to argue whole new legal positions just because his old ones have put him in a hole. The act of rejecting a ballot, and then turning around and asking for it to be counted, would seem to fit neatly into this category.

One other thing to think about, which I’d argued yesterday: Coleman has been calling as witnesses certain rejected absentee voters, who when pressed will admit they were contacted and screened by the Republican Party as Coleman supporters. But those calls didn’t come until about three weeks ago, after the absentee-sorting process was already over. Could the Coleman people have found out too late that they were shooting down votes for themselves?

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