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Democracy and Elections
Democratic Senators: Franken Won't Be Seated with New Class
Posted by Sam Stein, Ryan Grim, Huffington Post on January 6, 2009 at 9:16 AM.
Fallout from the surreal political scandal in Illinois has now wafted into Minnesota.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is refusing to seat Roland Burris, appointed by disgraced Ill. Gov. Rod Blagojevich, for lack of state certification. That's a problem for Al Franken, who also lacks final state certification despite the fact that the state canvassing board declared him the winner Monday.
Will Senate Democrats seat Franken without official certification? "I don't think so," said Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois.
"Republicans will object to trying to seat him," said Reid spokesman Jim Manley. Later in the day, Manley said that Democratic leadership would not seat Franken when the new class of Senators was sworn in on Tuesday. "Now that the bipartisan state canvassing board has certified Al Franken as the winner, we hope Senator Coleman respects its decision and does not drag this out for months with litigation... However, there will not be an effort to seat Mr. Franken tomorrow."
The remarks from Senate's top two Democrats cast a shadow on what was an otherwise bright day for Franken's political objectives. The comedian-turned-Senate aspirant claimed victory on Monday after the Minnesota canvassing board's final tallies showed him with a 1,212,431 to 1,212,206 vote victory.
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Update: Al Franken Declared Winner; Coleman's Options Dwindle
Posted by Steve Benen, Washington Monthly on January 5, 2009 at 11:29 AM.
Update from Satyam over at Think Progress:
The Minnesota State Canvassing board has certified results showing that Al Franken has won the Minnesota Senate recount, beating Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN) by 225 votes. But the race is still "in limbo," as the Board’s declaration "starts a seven-day clock for Coleman to file a lawsuit protesting the result" -- which he has indicated he will do. Senate Republicans have said they will filibuster any attempt to seat Franken while litigation is pending.
Original Post by Steve Benen:
It's going to be increasingly difficult for Norm Coleman and the Republican Party to justify dragging this out even further.
The Minnesota state Supreme Court has turned down Sen. Norm Coleman's plea to include 654 rejected absentee ballots in the final vote count in his race against entertainer Al Franken, a major setback for the GOP incumbent who is seeking to make up a 225-vote deficit.
The Court -- in an opinion issued this afternoon and signed by Chief Justice Alan Page ( a member of the Purple People Eaters) -- said that Coleman's attempt to include these rejected absentees did not meet the criteria for counting ballots laid out in a previous ruling, specifically that both sides had to agree for any additional ballots to be counted.
"Because the parties and the respective counties have not agreed as to any of these additional ballots, the merits of this dispute (and any other disputes with respect to absentee ballots) are the proper subject of an election contest," wrote Page.
And with that, Franken should be declared the winner in about an hour.
Lead Franken attorney Marc Elias released a statement in response to the court ruling, "Today, the Supreme Court once again affirmed the validity of the rules under which this recount was conducted. Minnesotans have waited a long time for a winner to be declared in this race, and today, with the last attempt to halt the counting process now having failed, Al Franken will be declared the winner."
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Franken Winning Vast Majority of Wrongly Rejected Absentee Ballots
Posted by tremayne, Open Left on January 3, 2009 at 5:53 PM.
Norm Coleman's lawyers tried to stop the counting of hundreds of wrongly rejected absentee ballots and now we know they had good reason: those ballots are breaking for Al Franken who is winning nearly 60 percent of them. With another 15 percent going to "other" that doesn't leave many for Coleman.
The Uptake has a live feed where the votes are now being counted and you can also check their live updated spreadsheet here. But as of right now:
Franken: 270
Coleman: 160
Other/No vote: 79
So to win, Coleman must get a court to throw out these newly counted ballots and then trim another 50 votes off Franken's total somehow. Good luck with that Norm.
Conservatives Preparing for Franken Victory
Posted by Sam Stein, Huffington Post on December 31, 2008 at 6:40 AM.
As the window closes on Norm Coleman's chances for retaining his seat in the Senate, some conservatives are beginning to envision life without the Minnesota Republican.
In a filing on the conservative website, NewsMax.com, author David A. Patten looked at the numbers and saw in them a Coleman-less Senate.
The counting of improperly rejected absentee ballots will probably increase Democratic challenger Al Franken's lead over incumbent GOP Sen. Norm Coleman according to a new analysis of voting trends, effectively relegating Coleman to filing lawsuits considered unlikely to reverse the outcome of the election.
Others on the right are not ready to accept defeat. National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair John Cornyn released a statement on Tuesday indicating that some GOP senators would resist seating Franken before the courts have their say, even if the Democratic challenger is declared the winner of the recount. "I expect the Senate would have a problem seating a candidate who has not duly won an election," Cornyn claimed.
In private, meanwhile, GOP officials have begun to contemplate Al Franken -- whose lead stands at a scant 50 votes and with largely favorable absentee ballots left to count -- ending up in Washington D.C.
By and large, such discussion has not surfaced in public. Coleman's hopes hinge on uncovering enough wrongfully rejected absentee ballots to overcome his current deficit but also the possibility of legally challenging the results.
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Coleman Threatens to Derail Recount, Secretary of State Expects Resolution
Posted by Sam Stein, Huffington Post on December 30, 2008 at 6:35 AM.
Entering the final stages of the Minnesota recount process, Sen. Norm Coleman has made some dramatic moves meant to improve his long-shot chances. In the process, the Republican Senator is threatening the conclusion of the election.
On Monday, the Minnesota Republican identified a scant 136 wrongfully rejected absentee ballots (out of 1,346) that he wanted to be counted in the final tally. In addition, Coleman proposed to add 700 contested absentee ballots for review (Al Franken proposed adding 85), suggesting that he is more interested in reclaiming the lead rather than operating in good faith. Since resolution of the absentee-ballot issue is dependent on both campaigns and local officials agreeing on which votes should be reconsidered, Coleman's actions threaten to derail the delicate path on which the recount process had set.
As the Associated Press reported on Monday, "Coleman's proposed additions skew heavily toward suburban and rural counties, where he did best in the election."
And yet, as suspicious as the moves seem on the surface, local officials kept a calm veneer. Reached by phone, Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie tried to assuage concerns that Coleman's actions would endanger any short-term consensus on a Senate winner. Stating, simply, that he expected both campaigns to be "amenable" during this stage of the recount, Ritchie described the Coleman campaign's move on Monday as just another step in a meticulous process of declaring a final vote official.
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Campaign Round-Up: Franken To Be Seated? Blago Out By February? Jeb Will Run?
Posted by Steve Benen, Washington Monthly on December 29, 2008 at 10:17 AM.
MONDAY'S CAMPAIGN ROUND-UP....Today's installment of campaign-related news items that wouldn't generate a post of their own, but may be of interest to political observers.
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Senator Al Franken? It's Looking That Way ...
Posted by Steve Benen, Washington Monthly on December 25, 2008 at 3:29 AM.
The Minnesota Supreme Court may have sealed Norm Coleman's fate yesterday.
In a unanimous decision handed down just now, the state Supremes denied Coleman any relief in a lawsuit he was waging to deal with allegations of double-counted absentee ballots, which his campaign says have given an illegitimate edge to Al Franken. The Coleman campaign was seeking to switch 25 selected precincts back to their Election Night totals, which would undo all of Franken's recount gains in those areas and put Coleman back in the lead.
The court, however, sided with the Franken camp's lawyers in saying that a question like this should be reserved for a post-recount election contest proceeding, as the proper forum to discover evidence -- and which also has a burden of proof that heavily favors the certified winner.
Simply put, Coleman is in very big trouble right now. With Al Franken leading by 47 votes, this lawsuit was Coleman's best shot at coming from behind. And it just failed, making a Franken win nearly a foregone conclusion when this recount finishes up in early January.
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Coleman and Franken Make a Deal
Posted by Rachel Weiner, Huffington Post on December 24, 2008 at 9:23 AM.
Minnesota Public Radio reports that Sen. Norm Coleman and challenger Al Franken have struck a deal on disputed absentee ballots in their recount.
The plan they've submitted, which must be reviewed by the Minnesota Supreme Court, would count rejected absentees only if both sides agree they were wrongly cast aside.
The proposal draws out the process past the high court's end-of-the-year deadline. It could leave Minnesota without a decision on who won the race until after the new class of Senators is sworn in on Jan. 6.
Ritchie said concluding the work in time for the new session of Congress is not something he's at all concerned about.
"We've been really clear in saying our top priority is accuracy and transparency and the timing thing is just not our issue," [Secretary of State Mark] Ritchie said. "I want to put an underline, we don't care as long as it's accurate and we've done it in an accurate and transparent way. We don't care when it's done."
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Franken-Coleman Update: Coleman's Desperate Haily Marys
Posted by Phoenix Woman, Firedoglake on December 23, 2008 at 8:16 PM.
Another day, another set of Hail Mary efforts by the Coleman campaign. They fared about as well as Norm's previous Hail Marys -- that is to say, not well at all.
First up was his bid to have 16 ballots that had been marked with an "X" pulled and reviewed by the state canvassing board, out of a stated concern that the ballots had either been assigned to the wrong candidate or not counted at all. The 16 ballots soon became 40 ballots, which were all pulled and reviewed -- and no votes were changed as a result.
Second up was his petition to the Minnesota Supreme Court to get rid of what he claimed were "duplicate ballots" in the city of Minneapolis. As mentioned yesterday, the Hennepin County Canvassing Board itself filed a motion with the Soops The Supremes didn't rule on it yet -- they probably won't until tomorrow, per The UpTake's Mike McIntee in his video recap -- but judging from their comments as Twittered by The UpTake, they didn't seem to be too friendly towards Coleman's arguments.
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Al Franken Projected to Win Minnesota's Senate Seat
Posted by Sam Stein, Huffington Post on December 18, 2008 at 5:02 PM.
Democratic challenger Al Franken finds himself on the cusp of winning a seat in the United States Senate after Minnesota's canvassing board awarded him a host of challenged votes during deliberations on Thursday.
As of 8PM ET, the Minneapolis Star Tribune projected that Franken would finish the recount process with a lead of 89 votes, positioning him to become the 59th Democratic senator in the upcoming Congress.
According to local paper tallies, Franken currently trails Sen. Norm Coleman by a mere five votes, down from the 358-vote margin that the Republican held just last night. The Associated Press had the count even closer, with Coleman ahead by two votes.
The gains came as the canvassing board sifted through hundreds of ballots that Coleman had contested during the recount process. On Friday, the canvassing board will consider another 400 or so Coleman challenges. If the pattern remains consistent, Franken should vault past his opponent to a projected lead of approximately 89 votes, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
The process by which the Senate race has come to this stage is often confusing. Coleman held an approximately 200-vote lead after the state went through a hand recount of all ballots. However, there remained approximately 1,500 ballots that one or the other campaign contested (and temporarily removed from the overall vote tally). Coleman challenged about 1,000 of these, Franken the rest.
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Minnesota Update: Lawyers Duke it Out in Franken-Coleman Recount
Posted by Steve Benen, Washington Monthly on December 18, 2008 at 7:33 AM.
The Mess in Minnesota just keeps getting stranger.
Republican Sen. Norm Coleman went before the state Supreme Court on Wednesday to block improperly rejected absentee ballots from Minnesota's U.S. Senate recount, with his lawyer warning that justices must act to prevent a repeat of the tortured 2000 Bush-Gore impasse.
"With the best of intentions, this could become Florida 2008," attorney Roger Magnuson told the court, saying it would be improper to add votes not counted on Election Day.
The argument drew stern words from Justice Paul Anderson.
"This is not Florida," Anderson said. "I don't appreciate the comparison."
I can't say I blame him. But keep in mind, Coleman's lawyers aren't using the Fiasco in Florida from eight years ago as a disaster to avoid, they're using it as a template for their current arguments. As Kevin explained last night, Coleman hopes to stop vote counting "by using Bush v. Gore as precedent for an Equal Protection Clause claim," the same Bush v. Gore decision "that was so contrary to previous conservative opinion that the court specifically (and to considerable mockery) stated that 'Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances.'"
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Franken Campaign Claims to Be Up by Four Votes: Recount Ends (But Not Really) in Minnesota
Posted by Steve Benen, Washington Monthly on December 5, 2008 at 1:11 PM.
The good news is, the statewide recount of the unresolved Senate race in Minnesota ended this afternoon. The bad news is, the resolution of this contest is still quite a ways off.
At 11:29 a.m., Wright County maintenance worker Allen Buskey pushed a cart with 10 boxes of ballots into Room 217 at the county government center in Buffalo and locked up the last of the 2.9 million ballots recounted since Nov. 19.
"We're done," said state elections director Gary Poser, after putting stickers on the 21st challenged ballot from the Wright County town of Montrose.
Well, some folks are done. There are still the 133 missing ballots from Minneapolis, and more importantly, there are thousands of challenged ballots that will be reviewed by the state Canvassing Board starting on Dec. 16. Likely court fights suggest even that phase won't actually end the contest.
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Bureaucratic Errors Thwart Some Ohio Voters in 2008
Posted by Sanford Lewis on December 4, 2008 at 11:52 AM.
Producer Sanford Lewis went to Ohio to investigate problems in the Cleveland area during the 2008 Presidential Election.
Franken Campaign: Al Pulls Ahead by 22 Votes
Posted by Sam Stein, Huffington Post on December 3, 2008 at 12:39 PM.
Al Franken's campaign announced on Wednesday that, for the first time since the Minnesota recount began, the Democrat has actually pulled ahead of Republican Sen. Norm Coleman.
Speaking on a conference call with reporters, Franken's chief counsel Marc Elias said the campaign's own internal count showed them up 22 votes, a jump from the 13 vote deficit that they faced on Tuesday.
"We have approximately 138,000 ballots left to count," said Elias. "94.3 percent of the state has now been counted... Obviously that number is going to change, but we are pleased thus far with how things are going."
If true (the official state and newspaper numbers show a margin more favorable to Coleman, owing to the many challenges each campaign has logged), the tally underscores just how incredibly close the Minnesota race has become. On Wednesday, the state will go over ballots from Wright County -- a largely Republican area that could thrust Norm Coleman back into the lead.
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More Strange Turns in the Franken-Coleman Recount
Posted by Steve Benen, Washington Monthly on December 3, 2008 at 5:01 AM.
You probably thought, as I did, that the recount in Minnesota's Senate race couldn't possibly take any more strange turns. Think again.
The final day of ballot recounting in Ramsey County in the U.S. Senate race kicked up controversy today when 171 uncounted ballots from Maplewood turned up.
The ballots apparently had been uncounted because of a ballot-counting machine malfunction on Election Day. Although the official numbers were still being tabulated, representatives from U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman's campaign said challenger Al Franken appeared to pick up a net gain of 37 votes because of the situation.
They also said there were 31 more ballots than the number of voters who signed in at Maplewood's Sixth Precinct at the Hazelwood Fire Station. "We're looking into that right now because there should not be more ballots than voters," said Joe Mansky, Ramsey County's elections manager. He said the number of voters who were registered and signed in, plus the number of same-day registrants and absentee voters should equal the number of ballots, but the 31 extra ballots remain under investigation.
The ballot counter malfunctioned after 171 ballots had been feed into the machine, Mansky said. When the machinery was replaced, the ballots were in the ballot box but went uncounted until today's recount.
Of course, it's extremely unlikely that all 171 uncounted ballots will go to Franken; he may, however, be positioned to narrow the gap against Coleman a little more. If this precinct was similar to those around it, Franken would pick up a net gain for about 12 votes.
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