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Dec 16, 2008 8:54 pm US/Central
On 1st Day, MN Board Reviews 160 Franken Ballots
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) ―
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One example: The Al Franken campaign challenged this vote from Brooklyn Park (Precinct 4), saying voter intent was unclear.. The challenge was rejected, and the vote went to Norm Coleman.
Minnesota Secretary of State
Republican Norm Coleman's lead in Minnesota's U.S. Senate race grew slightly on Tuesday as a special board began refereeing more than a thousand disputed ballots in a process expected to last several days.
Coleman led Democrat Al Franken by 264 votes, up from 188, after the five-member state Canvassing Board spent some five hours squinting at piles of ballots trying to figure out exactly what voters intended. Coleman's gain may be deceptive, since the board focused almost entirely on challenges from the Franken campaign that were mostly brought to try to keep a Coleman vote off the board.
The board hoped to make it through some 1,400 challenges by the end of the week. They only did 161 the first day, but attorneys for both campaigns said they would probably withdraw more challenges based on the board's early decisions. Secretary of State Mark Ritchie said if that happens the board could still finish by Friday.
Coleman added 98 votes to his total and Franken picked up 22; another 41 went to neither man. Less than 40 percent of the challenges reviewed on Tuesday were upheld.
In coming days the board will take up a greater portion of Coleman's challenges, and if they dismiss them at a similar rate Franken is likely to regain lost ground. The senator has twice as many challenges before the board as Franken.
Ritchie had hoped the decisions would be unanimous, but in several early cases, they weren't.
As their work began, the Canvassing Board mulled whether a partially filled oval should count (in one case, it didn't) and whether a voter's initials could be construed as a deliberate attempt to identify a ballot (they allowed the Coleman vote to stand).
As Ramsey County Judge Kathleen Gearin inspected a ballot with a full Coleman oval and initials near a partially filled Franken oval, she was clearly uncertain.
"I can't tell whether it means they're trying to tell us they goofed when they started voting for Franken," said Gearin, one of the board's five members.
The board set the tone for a common challenge, ruling that fictional characters such as Mickey Mouse appearing as write-ins weren't enough to disqualify a ballot. Many challenges for silly write-ins were flagged as having identifying marks.
The board also set an early pattern by refusing to disqualify ballots where voters had written multiple names into races other than the Senate race -- another common basis for challenges.
But the members split on another type of challenge, where an X appeared atop or beneath a filled oval. Some were ruled clear votes, others were set aside.
"We're not going to be entirely consistent. Part of it is going to be how the ballot strikes us," Supreme Court Chief Justice Eric Magnuson, a board member, said to no one in particular. "This isn't an exact science."
As the board examined a ballot, its image was projected on overhead screens for the campaign representatives, media and the public. The campaigns tried to jump in and offer opinions, but board members stressed that they didn't want arguments over every call.
"One of the things that's going to take forever is if the parties think we're going to need all these things explained," Magnuson told the campaign attorneys at one point. Still, the board did allow attorneys to interject from time to time.
As the first day's meeting wrapped up, several board members said they thought too many of the challenges they were forced to weigh were frivolous -- and urged both campaigns to further reduce their challenges.
"I'm disappointed," Gearin said. "I don't think the campaigns have in fact gone through these as seriously as they should have."
The overtime race pitted Coleman, the one-term incumbent and former St. Paul mayor, against Franken, who grew up in Minnesota and returned to the state in 2005 to launch a political career after finding success as a "Saturday Night Live" comic and liberal satirist.
The contest between the two was hard-fought and at times ugly, and when the smoke cleared the day after the election Coleman led Franken by a tiny margin out of almost 2.9 million cast. That was close enough to automatically trigger a statewide recount, forcing both campaigns to push forward almost as if the election had never happened -- continuing to raise money, recruit volunteers and spin the media.
The margin between the two candidates fluctuated, with Coleman clinging to a 215-vote edge as the recount started. By the end of the recount the gap was 188, a number dwarfed by the mountain of disputed ballots.
Some 5,000 challenges were withdrawn before the canvassing board began its work. The Secretary of State's office hadn't immediately processed those withdrawn challenges to give them to Coleman or Franken where appropriate.
Besides the challenged ballots, legal wrangling continues over wrongly rejected absentee ballots, projected to be about 1,600, that the Canvassing Board asked counties to sort and count. The Coleman campaign petitioned the state Supreme Court hoping to halt that process, arguing that the board failed to set uniform standards for doing so, and a Wednesday hearing is planned.
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Norm Coleman was born in New York City in 1949. Al Franken was born in New York City in 1951.
(© 2009 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
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