Franken-Coleman Update: Now It's Al's Turn

Editor's note: This post was originally posted yesterday morning at Campaign Silo.

After six weeks of representing Norm Coleman's case to the three judges on the Election Contest Court, the Coleman legal team has "provisionally" rested -- which means it's now the Franken team's turn at bat. 

The Franken team will make a motion to dismiss the case entirely as the Franken camp claims that there's no way for Coleman to take the lead in the vote count.   (Franken's lead, per Jay Weiner at MinnPost, stands unofficially at 255 -- that is, 258 minus three of the Nauen voters; those three voters' ballots were pulled from the count by the court yesterday.)  This motion will likely not get anywhere as the court has already indicated that some additional ballots will be counted, and it has hinted that some others such as Pile 3a (which WineRev explains here) will also be counted. Taken together, the total number of additional ballots is large enough to potentially give Coleman the lead, and so long as that possibility exists, however small, the case cannot be dismissed.   Franken may fare better with the motion for summary judgment, especially if it involved the missing Minneapolis ballots that Coleman's camp finally admitted existed last week; if the ECC now believes there is no factual dispute to be settled any more with regard to these ballots, then that issue may be struck from the contest in the interest of speeding things along.