Coleman is casting wider net for votes
By PAT DOYLE and MIKE KASZUBA, Star Tribune staff writers
Last update: January 12, 2009 - 12:30 PM
startribune.com
His requests are frustrating county elections officials, who are being asked to produce thousands of documents.
In their fight to overturn the U.S. Senate recount, Norm Coleman's legal team has begun pressing some Minnesota counties for documents on hundreds of thousands of ballots that were not previously disputed.
The lawsuit that Coleman filed last week to erase DFLer Al Franken's 225-vote lead cites a few dozen specific ballot errors that he says favored Franken. But Coleman's camp is also now casting a much wider net for other mistakes that could cost Franken votes.
The latest requests, dealing with approved absentee ballots and precinct voter rosters, are frustrating some counties. "You're talking 30,000, 40,000 pages of documents," said Stearns County elections chief Dave Walz, referring to his county alone. Joe Mansky, Ramsey County's election director, said the county has received requests for copies of "over 200,000 pieces of paper" from the campaigns.
Coleman's new strategy comes as some elections officials are expressing skepticism over his campaign's unproven assumptions that some votes were counted twice and that some absentee ballots were wrongly rejected or accepted.
Coleman lawyer Fritz Knaak agreed that the campaign's court case relies on turning assumptions of widespread voting errors into a reality big enough to overtake Franken.
"Anecdotally and otherwise, we have what we consider to be a reasonable basis, a very reasonable basis, to proceed with this on the expectation that we will see more votes," Knaak said.
Properly rejected?
The campaign rests much of its case on 654 absentee ballots that local officials rejected for not complying with state law. Coleman wants the three-judge panel that will hear his lawsuit to include those ballots, most of which come from rural and suburban areas favorable to Republicans.
Although those ballots weren't reviewed by the state Canvassing Board during the recount, some local election officials sifted through them as recently as last week after the suit was filed to see whether some should be counted.
Inquiries to a sampling of those counties and cities show local officials standing by nearly all of their earlier decisions:
• Goodhue and Anoka counties maintained that their combined share of the 654 ballots -- 22 -- should be excluded.
• In Minnetonka, City Clerk David Maeda said he saw no reason to include any of the 14 ballots he reviewed. "I was concerned that I missed some," he said, explaining why he reviewed them after Coleman filed his suit. "I think all [of them] that I looked at were properly rejected."
• Scott County's election supervisor, Mary Kay Kes, said she wouldn't include any of the 32 disputed ballots from there.
• Dakota County's Joel Beckman, the county's chief election official, said he quickly looked through a half-dozen of the 94 ballots Coleman included as part of its list. "Every one of them was rejected for good reason," Beckman said.
• In Stearns County, election chief Walz said more than a dozen ballots Coleman wants reconsidered "were technically deficient without much debate."
• The only county sampled that reported changing its mind was Mower, which decided that signatures for one rejected ballot matched after earlier ruling otherwise. But Auditor-Treasurer Doug Groh defended the rejection of the other ballots.
Handwriting analysis
In most instances, the local elections officials said, the disputed ballots that Coleman wants reviewed involved questions about voter signatures, including mismatches between the signature on an absentee ballot application and on the envelope that contained the ballot.
Knaak insisted that the Coleman campaign would win some of the signature disputes and said county officials were unwilling to reconsider.
"At this point everybody is locked in, it doesn't matter," he said. "We're going to be bringing these things, and the decision is going to be made by the court."
If the disagreements advance to trial, they could force the three judges to act as handwriting experts, a role some local officials have found uncomfortable. |
