The Franken legal team have made it clear that they don’t intend to simply play defense and prevent Norm Coleman from gaining the 226 votes he’ll need to win. In fact, they’re playing a very active offense to pick up as many additional votes as they can.
This afternoon, Franken attorney David Lillehaug was questioning Washington County elections official Kevin Corbid, attempting to make a case that some precincts in his county lost ballots during the recount and gave Coleman a net “gain” of ten votes. Corbid’s theory has been that ballots were double-scanned by the machines on Election Night, but he admitted that ballot-loss is a possibility, and the evidence isn’t complete.
At his press conference earlier this evening, Coleman lawyer Ben Ginsberg fired back. “What you’ve now seen today is Mr. Lillehaug’s attempt to denigrate the results of the election, to call it into question,” Ginsberg said, accusing Franken of running down the integrity of election officials — apparently with no sense of self-awareness.
Another example of the active approach is a Franken legal filing today, seeking to expand the number of rejected ballots for which they would be able to plead for reconsideration. Their argument is that the court has allowed Coleman to argue for 4,800 votes, and therefore Franken deserves a chance to also move beyond his own original list of 771 envelopes.
At his press conference, Ginsberg also said that the Franken camp’s desire to expand their pool of ballots was hypocritical — Coleman has been attacked for apparently cherry-picking votes, while Franken’s motion implies the same activity — though he added that Coleman does support reviewing more ballots as a proposition.
