Franken Wins Major Recount Victory; More Allegations Against Coleman Revealed

Posted by Sam Stein, Huffington Post at 12:09 PM on December 12, 2008.

Franken Wins Major Victory Over Rejected Absentee Ballots

Al Franken received a potentially major boost towards his hopes of becoming Senator on Friday, when Minnesota state officials ruled that absentee ballots rejected because of clerical or administrative errors should, in the end, be counted.

The decision by the state canvassing board -- which was unanimous -- is, essentially, an official request for county officials to go back and count the wrongfully rejected absentee votes. This process has already begun in many counties and could portend sizeable gains for Franken.

The Democratic challenger has spent the past few weeks demanding that the state review the approximately 1,500 absentee ballots that they contend were unlawfully dismissed. Many of these votes have come from traditionally Democratic locales where, for one reason or another, voters are more likely to make clerical errors when completing their ballots.

The state has set December 19th as the end date for the sorting and counting of this absentee ballot pool (hardly a restrictive time frame for completing the task). The Coleman campaign retains the right to appeal the decision to a district or state court.

With the hand recount over in the state's Senate race, Franken's campaign claims to be clinging to a four-vote lead. This count, however, assumes that none of the challenges to ballots during the recount process will be upheld. In short: the race is incredibly tight. The inclusion of this pool of rejected absentee ballots could very well push Franken into the Senate.

UPDATE: The Franken campaign got more good news from the canvass board hearing. The state had, during the recount process, been unable to locate 133 ballots from the Minneapolis area. But rather than disregarding these votes, officials decided that they will use the results from Election Day.

Did Coleman's Financial Straits Force Him To Solicit Donor Favors?

Did Norm Coleman's financial problems compel him to turn to friends and GOP donors for help with his living situation?

That's what a new story out of Minnesota alleges. Friday morning, a local Fox News affiliate reported that at the time that Coleman allegedly received $75,000 in unreported payments from a prominent Republican businessman, he was also struggling to make payments for the restructuring of his home.

Good government officials wondered whether there was something more than coincidental to the financial exchange. And, indeed, there is other compelling -- and up to this point, unnoted -- evidence to suggest that Coleman was soliciting monetary favors from his GOP backers.

Around the same time that Coleman and/or his wife were allegedly receiving three $25,000 payments from businessman Nasser Kazeminy, the Senator was also getting cheaply discounted rent from a major Republican figure who served as his landlord in Washington D.C.

In July 2007 -- months after lawsuits assert that $75,000 was secretly funneled to the Colemans -- the Senator began paying $600 a month rent on his one-bedroom apartment on Capitol Hill, way below market value. His landlord, Republican operative and communications guru Jeff Larson, also was covering Coleman's utilities (under an apparent agreement that the Senator would be billed with an estimate once the year was over).

At the time, the D.C. arrangement raised a variety of eyebrows, mainly because Coleman had helped Larson secure millions in business related to the Republican Convention in St. Paul. The new revelations, however, suggest that the rent may have been more a favor that Larson was offering to Coleman than any sort of bribery.

Indeed, in two separate lawsuits that emerged this fall, it is alleged that, around this time, the Colemans (one of the Senate's least rich families) were in financial straits. According to one of the lawsuits in March of 2007, Kazeminy said that "U.S. Senators don't make s---" and that he was going to try to funnel money to the Minnesota Republican. From there, it is alleged, Kazeminy arranged for the three $25,000 payments to be made from his Texas-based Deep Marine Technology to Hays Companies in Minnesota for "insurance." Laurie Coleman is, officially, an employee at Hays. But she is not a licensed insurance agent.

Records provided by the Coleman campaign to the local Fox affiliate show that, during the same month that Kazeminy made his profanity-laced statement about Coleman's financial situation, the Senator refinanced his home. He and his wife had to cover construction costs on his home, which had jumped from $328,000 to $414,000 months earlier.

Sam Stein is a Political Reporter at the Huffington Post, based in Washington, D.C.