Posted January 5, 200916 yr MSNBC.com Franken on top in recount, but lawsuit looms Minn. board certifies results showing Democrat winning Senate race The Associated Press updated 5:43 p.m. ET, Mon., Jan. 5, 2009 MINNEAPOLIS - A Minnesota board on Monday certified results showing Democrat Al Franken winning the state's U.S. Senate recount over Republican Norm Coleman, whose lawyer promised a legal challenge that probably will keep the race in limbo for months. The Canvassing Board's declaration started a seven-day clock for Coleman, the incumbent, to file a lawsuit protesting the result. His attorney Tony Trimble said the challenge will be filed within 24 hours. The challenge will keep Franken from getting the election certificate he needs to take the seat in Washington. "This process isn't at an end," Trimble said. "It is now just at the beginning." Franken, a former "Saturday Night Live" personality, ended the recount up by 225 votes, an astonishingly thin margin in a race where more than 2.9 million votes were cast. "After 62 days of careful and painstaking hand-inspection of nearly 3 million ballots, after hours and hours of hard work by election officials and volunteers around the state, I am proud to stand before you as the next senator from Minnesota," Franken said Monday in brief remarks to reporters outside his downtown condominium. Coleman's campaign said he would make an appearance Tuesday in Minnesota. He was in Washington on Monday. The recount reversed the unofficial Election Day results, which showed Coleman with a 215-vote lead. Franken made up the deficit over seven tortuous weeks of ballot-sifting in part by prevailing on challenges that both campaigns brought to thousands of ballots. He also did better than Coleman when election officials opened and counted more than 900 absentee ballots that had erroneously been disqualified on Election Day. Coleman's lawyers have argued that some ballots were mishandled and others were wrongly excluded from the recount, giving Franken an unfair advantage. After a Minnesota Supreme Court decision went against Coleman earlier Monday ? he had sought to add hundreds more rejected absentees from Republican-leaning areas ? lead attorney Fritz Knaak said a lawsuit was inevitable. Secretary of State Mark Ritchie was careful to note Monday that the board was simply signing off on the numbers found by the recount: Franken, with 1,212,431 votes, and Coleman, with 1,212,206 votes. "We're not doing anything today that declares winners or losers or anything to that effect," Ritchie said. All five members of the canvassing board ? Ritchie, plus two state Supreme Court justices and two Ramsey County judges ? voted to accept the recount results. A lawsuit would extend the fight over the seat for months. Any court case would open doors closed to the campaigns during the administrative recount. They would be able to access voter rolls, inspect machines and get testimony from election workers. The case would fall to a three-judge panel picked by Chief Justice Eric Magnuson of the Supreme Court. Magnuson served on the Canvassing Board, but declined to say Monday if he would remove himself from the selection process as a result. Magnuson was an appointee of Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty. The campaigns continued the political maneuvering that has marked the nearly two months of the recount. Marc Elias, Franken's lead recount attorney, referred to his client as "Senator-elect Franken." "Former Senator Coleman has to make a decision," Elias said. "And it is a profound decision, one that he has to look into his heart to make: Whether or not he wants to be the roadblock to the state moving forward and play the role of a spoiler or sore loser or whether he wants to accept what was a very close election." "The race in Minnesota is over," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. He called the Republican efforts to continue challenging Franken's election "only a little finger pointing." Trimble, meanwhile, said that irregularities in the recount mean there "can be no confidence" in the results. And he said Coleman didn't want any delay in filing a challenge. Minnesota law doesn't allow the issuance of a final election certificate until legal challenges are settled, meaning the state will be represented only by Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat, when Congress convenes on Tuesday. Coleman's term expired Saturday. Link It looks like it might be awhile before he actually makes it to the Senate, thanks to the lawsuits.
January 6, 200916 yr I am sure the republican party will try to make this joke the face of the party and hurt the democrats =/... I am sure hte democrats will also hate him and he will be the black sheep of senate.
January 6, 200916 yr http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123111967642552909.html Funny Business in Minnesota In which every dubious ruling seems to help Al Franken. Strange things keep happening in Minnesota, where the disputed recount in the Senate race between Norm Coleman and Al Franken may be nearing a dubious outcome. Thanks to the machinations of Democratic Secretary of State Mark Ritchie and a meek state Canvassing Board, Mr. Franken may emerge as an illegitimate victor. [Review & Outlook] AP Mr. Franken started the recount 215 votes behind Senator Coleman, but he now claims a 225-vote lead and suddenly the man who was insisting on "counting every vote" wants to shut the process down. He's getting help from Mr. Ritchie and his four fellow Canvassing Board members, who have delivered inconsistent rulings and are ignoring glaring problems with the tallies. Under Minnesota law, election officials are required to make a duplicate ballot if the original is damaged during Election Night counting. Officials are supposed to mark these as "duplicate" and segregate the original ballots. But it appears some officials may have failed to mark ballots as duplicates, which are now being counted in addition to the originals. This helps explain why more than 25 precincts now have more ballots than voters who signed in to vote. By some estimates this double counting has yielded Mr. Franken an additional 80 to 100 votes. This disenfranchises Minnesotans whose vote counted only once. And one Canvassing Board member, State Supreme Court Justice G. Barry Anderson, has acknowledged that "very likely there was a double counting." Yet the board insists that it lacks the authority to question local officials and it is merely adding the inflated numbers to the totals. In other cases, the board has been flagrantly inconsistent. Last month, Mr. Franken's campaign charged that one Hennepin County (Minneapolis) precinct had "lost" 133 votes, since the hand recount showed fewer ballots than machine votes recorded on Election Night. Though there is no proof to this missing vote charge -- officials may have accidentally run the ballots through the machine twice on Election Night -- the Canvassing Board chose to go with the Election Night total, rather than the actual number of ballots in the recount. That decision gave Mr. Franken a gain of 46 votes. The Opinion Journal Widget Download Opinion Journal's widget and link to the most important editorials and op-eds of the day from your blog or Web page. Meanwhile, a Ramsey County precinct ended up with 177 more ballots than there were recorded votes on Election Night. In that case, the board decided to go with the extra ballots, rather than the Election Night total, even though the county is now showing more ballots than voters in the precinct. This gave Mr. Franken a net gain of 37 votes, which means he's benefited both ways from the board's inconsistency. And then there are the absentee ballots. The Franken campaign initially howled that some absentee votes had been erroneously rejected by local officials. Counties were supposed to review their absentees and create a list of those they believed were mistakenly rejected. Many Franken-leaning counties did so, submitting 1,350 ballots to include in the results. But many Coleman-leaning counties have yet to complete a re-examination. Despite this lack of uniformity, and though the state Supreme Court has yet to rule on a Coleman request to standardize this absentee review, Mr. Ritchie's office nonetheless plowed through the incomplete pile of 1,350 absentees this weekend, padding Mr. Franken's edge by a further 176 votes. In Today's Opinion Journal Both campaigns have also suggested that Mr. Ritchie's office made mistakes in tabulating votes that had been challenged by either of the campaigns. And the Canvassing Board appears to have applied inconsistent standards in how it decided some of these challenged votes -- in ways that, again on net, have favored Mr. Franken. The question is how the board can certify a fair and accurate election result given these multiple recount problems. Yet that is precisely what the five members seem prepared to do when they meet today. Some members seem to have concluded that because one of the candidates will challenge the result in any event, why not get on with it and leave it to the courts? Mr. Coleman will certainly have grounds to contest the result in court, but he'll be at a disadvantage given that courts are understandably reluctant to overrule a certified outcome. Meanwhile, Minnesota's other Senator, Amy Klobuchar, is already saying her fellow Democrats should seat Mr. Franken when the 111th Congress begins this week if the Canvassing Board certifies him as the winner. This contradicts Minnesota law, which says the state cannot award a certificate of election if one party contests the results. Ms. Klobuchar is trying to create the public perception of a fait accompli, all the better to make Mr. Coleman look like a sore loser and build pressure on him to drop his legal challenge despite the funny recount business. Minnesotans like to think that their state isn't like New Jersey or Louisiana, and typically it isn't. But we can't recall a similar recount involving optical scanning machines that has changed so many votes, and in which nearly every crucial decision worked to the advantage of the same candidate. The Coleman campaign clearly misjudged the politics here, and the apparent willingness of a partisan like Mr. Ritchie to help his preferred candidate, Mr. Franken. If the Canvassing Board certifies Mr. Franken as the winner based on the current count, it will be anointing a tainted and undeserving Senator.
January 6, 200916 yr The title of this topic should be changed Al Franken given or steals Senate seat. That is more accurate title . Franken did not receive more lawfully cast votes than Coleman. The dirty little secret in American politics is if the race is close it is not the voters who determine the out come but the vote counters . If I was Coleman as unfair as this result is I would not contest the result no point really the Minnesota courts, Minnesota Sec of State , are not going to give Coleman a fair crack and even if he does get a fair ruling , the US Senate will not allow him his seat .
January 6, 200916 yr Author You can't say for certain that Coleman won, either (unless you have personally counted every vote). I don't know if we'll know the truth or not.
January 6, 200916 yr You can't say for certain that Coleman won, either (unless you have personally counted every vote). I don't know if we'll know the truth or not. Coleman had more votes before all of these suspicious rulings came down and all of these additional ballots were created. The process of "counting" (creating) votes has not been consistent or fair . If it were up to me I would order a run off election between Franken and Coleman.
January 6, 200916 yr Would you say the same thing about Bush v. Gore? as far as revote yes (whole state no cherry picking counties).
January 6, 200916 yr Author Not all states have runoff elections. In Georgia their Senate election this year had to go to a runoff vote because it was within the required vote threshold.
January 9, 200916 yr You can't say for certain that Coleman won, either (unless you have personally counted every vote). I don't know if we'll know the truth or not. Coleman had more votes before all of these suspicious rulings came down and all of these additional ballots were created. The process of "counting" (creating) votes has not been consistent or fair . If it were up to me I would order a run off election between Franken and Coleman. More votes were certified in the recount...face it Franken won fair and square
January 9, 200916 yr Not all states have runoff elections. In Georgia their Senate election this year had to go to a runoff vote because it was within the required vote threshold. Actually, there was a runoff because no candidate won a majority.
January 9, 200916 yr Author Not all states have runoff elections. In Georgia their Senate election this year had to go to a runoff vote because it was within the required vote threshold. Actually, there was a runoff because no candidate won a majority. Yeah, that's what I was going for, but I didn't quite get there... :banghead
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