Franken lawyer Kevin Hamilton has been laying out a very biting case against Norm Coleman in today’s proceedings: That Coleman is now complaining about absentee voters being wrongly rejected, but his own campaign has personally taken part in throwing out ballots unfairly.
Hamilton had Ramsey County (St. Paul) elections director Joe Mansky go over a list of nearly 20 ballots that the local officials in the county decided were wrongly rejected, but the Coleman camp objected to under the controversial decision by the state Supreme Court that gave the campaigns an effective veto power over improperly-rejected absentees.
And some of these seemed to be obvious calls: Ballots that were initially rejected because the election officials didn’t see their names in the registration database, but then spotted the names on this second review of the registration lists. The Coleman campaign vetoed them by insisting that the voters were still not properly registered.
Hamilton then proceeded to build even further on the case that Coleman can’t justify a claim that he’ll win by opening up this process again.
Hamilton had Mansky go down a long list of other ballots that still haven’t been counted, presumably votes for Franken, with Mansky agreeing that they were improperly rejected and should be counted. The implication was clear: Coleman is bringing forth his own voters to complain that their votes haven’t been counted — but we can play this game, too.
One important example was Walter Thompson, an elderly man who declared in a sworn affidavit that he is blind and ill, and that his wife has a legal power-of-attorney to sign his absentee ballot materials using his name.
“And that was appropriate for him to do because of his disability, correct?” Hamilton asked Mansky, who agreed that this is a case where people are allowed to do that.
Note that Douglas Thompson, the Coleman camp’s friendly witness whose girlfriend signed his ballot application for him, is an able-bodied man in his 40’s who would not be able to authorize someone else to forge his signature on an absentee ballot application. So the Franken camp is sending the message that they not only have their own rejected voters ready to come in, but they have better ones.
