Another important development happened today in the Minnesota Senate trial: The Coleman campaign actually dropped one of their many claims against the election result.
Coleman was previously objecting to the counting of 171 ballots during the recount in the St. Paul suburb of Maplewood, which were in addition to the Election Night totals for that precinct. The ballots were found in a machine that had broken down on Election Night, thus leading to them not being in the original totals, and they gave Al Franken a net gain of 37 votes.
The Coleman camp initially tried to raise suspicions over the chain of custody, but were never able to find evidence of actual malfeasance. And over the last couple days the Franken camp laid out cases where Coleman approved of counting other found ballots during the recount, which just so happened to come from Republican areas. In other words, two can play this game.
So Coleman lawyer Joe Friedberg realized there were bigger fish to fry, and dropped this complaint. Then he moved on to the next order of business: The use of Election Night totals in a pro-Franken precinct where officials concluded that 133 ballots went missing in the recount, a decision that saved Franken from losing a net 46 votes. So don’t think this is all being resolved nicely.
