The Minnesota canvassing board making final rulings on ballots challenged by Al Franken for the second day. You can view a selection of the ballots reviewed yesterday here and read a liveblog here. The Franken campaign has withdrawn most of its frivolous challenges, leaving about 400 ballots for the board to review. (Once the board has ruled on Franken's challenges, it will review Coleman's roughly 1,000 challenged ballots.) Minnesota state law regarding determining voter intent is fairly clear, but there is still some room for interpretation.For example, state law declares: "If the names of two candidates have been marked, and an attempt has been made to erase or obliterate one of the marks, a vote shall be counted for the remaining marked candidate."
When a voter fills in both the oval for Franken and Coleman and places an X over Coleman, the board is holding that that X is a mark of "obliteration" rather than a mark of emphasis. There are some other difficult ballots--when a voter has filled in one candidate's oval partially and the other's completely, or when the mark is to the left or right of the oval. So far, the few of the board's 3 to 2 decisions I've seen have gone in Coleman's favor, with the Democratic secretary of state siding with the Republican appointed supreme court justices against the two liberal judges.
When the canvassing board took up the challenged ballots, Coleman led Franken by 192 votes, but analsyes by the AP and readers of the Star Tribune suggest that Franken is on pace to gain slightly more than 192 votes among the challenged ballots and thus take the lead.
When the board finishes its counting of the challenged ballots, it will likely accept revised vote totals from the counties that have added wrongly rejected absentee votes to their tallies. Coleman has a lawsuit before the state supreme court today arguing for the establishment of a uniform procedure for determining which ballots were wrongly rejected.
While the Franken campaign has been pushing for the inclusion of an estimated 1,600 wrongly rejected absentee ballots, it's not certain that they will break in his favor. As Philip Klein wrote the other day:
The Franken campaign wants these votes to be counted and the Coleman campaign does not -- after all, in a recount, it's always the team that's behind that wants to expand the universe of ballots and the winning side that wants to freeze them in place -- but until we get a better idea of how the absentee ballots in question are distributed among the counties, there's no empirical reason to believe that Franken actually would make significant gains, even if they were counted.
No matter which candidate is ahead after the canvassing board has accepted the wrongly rejected absentee ballots and the challenged ballots, you can expect the loser to file an elections contest in court. The Coleman campaign has argued that some ballots have been counted twice and that the counting of 133 missing ballots in a Minneapolis is illegal.
The Franken campaign, so far, has gotten breaks on their complaints--regarding the counting of missing 133 ballots and absentee ballots. But if Franken trails at the end of the day, you can be sure that they'll find some reason to take the election to court as well.
