Republican Norm Coleman continues to fight for fairness

The three-judge panel reviewing the Minnesota Senate race has declared Democrat Al Franken the winner, but Republican Norm Coleman intends to appeal to the state's Supreme Court. Of course Democrats are pressing for him to give up. The main issue is absentee ballots. Early in the recount, Several hundred questionable absentee ballots from Democratic precincts were allowed to be counted. This is where Al Franken got his narrow lead. Later, the three judge panel made a decision about which absentee ballots should be counted. This kept Norm Coleman from being able to use several thousand from precincts he felt would be favorable. The Al Franken absentee ballots would be uncountable under the new rules, but they were allowed to stay in the count anyway. This creates a double standard that is unfair to Coleman. The WSJ is reporting,

Case in point: the panel's dismal handling of absentee ballots. Early in the recount, the Franken team howled that some absentee votes had been erroneously rejected by local officials. We warned at the time that this was dangerous territory, designed to pressure election officials into accepting rejected ballots after the fact.

Yet instead of shutting this Franken request down, or early on issuing a clear set of rules as to which absentees were valid, the state Supreme Court and the canvassing board oversaw a haphazard process by which some counties submitted new batches to be included in the tally, while other counties did not. The resulting additional 933 ballots were largely responsible for Mr. Franken's narrow lead.

During the contest trial, the Coleman team presented evidence of a further 6,500 absentees that it felt deserved to be included under the process that had produced the prior 933. The three judges then finally defined what constituted a "legal" absentee ballot. Countable ballots, for instance, had to contain the signature of the voter, complete registration information, and proper witness credentials.

But the panel only applied these standards going forward, severely reducing the universe of additional absentees that the Coleman team could hope to have included. In the end, the three judges allowed only about 350 additional absentees to be counted. The panel also did nothing about the hundreds, possibly thousands, of absentees that have already been legally included, yet are now "illegal" according to the panel's own ex-post definition.