Politics

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) ― With the winner of Minnesota's U.S. Senate race still a mystery, the state Canvassing Board will begin chipping away at the pile of disputed ballots that's made it tough to give an advantage to Norm Coleman or Al Franken.

On Tuesday the board -- Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, two state Supreme Court justices and two Ramsey County judges -- will inspect as many as 1,500 ballots one by one, with every single disputed vote to be projected onto a screen.

Ritchie said challenge withdrawals by both campaigns in recent days will make the board's task easier. And attorneys for both campaigns said they think only a small fraction of the remaining challenges will require tough calls by the board.

Still, even if the board meets Ritchie's goal of finishing by Friday, it seems unlikely to amount to a final resolution.

A major issue of dispute is the handling of absentee ballots that were improperly rejected on Election Day, a number currently estimated at around 1,600. The Canvassing Board earlier told counties to sort and count such ballots, but the Coleman campaign on Monday asked the state Supreme Court to block that. The high court scheduled a hearing on the matter Wednesday.

"I won't ask them to sign something until I know we are as accurate as we can be," Ritchie said, speaking of his fellow Canvassing Board members. "We will know a tremendous amount by Friday night."

Coleman, the Republican incumbent, leads Democrat Franken by 188 votes pending the canvassing board's decisions on the disputed ballots.

Coleman, in requesting a temporary restraining order or injunction, argued that the Canvassing Board failed to set uniform standards for counties to decide whether ballots were improperly rejected.

Franken attorney Marc Elias said that amounted to trying to block the counting of some legally cast votes.

For now, the Canvassing Board intends to tally improperly rejected absentee votes as counties send in amended returns, said Deputy Secretary of State Jim Gelbmann.

By Monday, both campaigns had pledged to abandon many of the challenges lodged during the recount. The Coleman campaign said it would keep less than 1,000 of its challenges, while the Franken campaign said it would retain less than 500 -- though in a legal brief, his lawyers asserted the right to restore another 339 "incident-based" challenges tied to disputes or errors that arose at specific recount sites.

Attorneys for both sides said they believed the Canvass Board would be able to plow through many of the remaining challenges with little objection from the campaigns.

"We'll have to wait and see if patterns develop in terms of their decisions on certain matters," said Fritz Knaak, Coleman's attorney. "I'm expecting if that is the case both campaigns will be ready and willing to shed additional ballot challenges."

Elias said if patterns emerge from the board's decisions that it could be easy to proceed with the decisions in relatively quick fashion. For instance, he said the board might set an early example by quickly dismissing challenges over "distingushing marks" on ballots that amount to little more than an accidental pen swipe.

Still, both attorneys said they expected the right to argue against specific Canvassing Board decisions. Gelbmann said the secretary of state hoped that campaign attorneys would only speak up if asked questions by Canvassing Board members.

Ritchie hopes all Canvassing Board decisions are unanimous -- but short of that, state law allows for decisions by majority vote, Gelbmann said.

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