Politics

ST. PAUL (AP) ― Minnesota's Supreme Court on Friday blocked Democrat Al Franken's petition for an election certificate that would put him in the U.S. Senate without waiting for a lawsuit to run its course.

The decision means Minnesota's second Senate seat will remain empty until the lawsuit and possible appeals in state court are complete. Republican Norm Coleman's lawsuit challenging Franken's recount lead is at the end of its sixth week, and both sides expect it to last at least a few more weeks.

After a state board certified recount results showing Franken 225 votes ahead, he sued to force Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Secretary of State Mark Ritchie to sign an election certificate. Franken argued that federal law stipulates each state will have two senators when the Senate convenes, and that law trumped a state law that blocks such certificates while lawsuits are pending.

But the state Supreme Court disagreed. In their ruling Friday, the justices said states aren't required to issue such certificates by the date that Congress convenes.

The justices wrote in their unsigned opinion that "if the Senate believes delay in seating the second Senator from Minnesota adversely affects the Senate, it has the authority to remedy the situation and needs no certificate of election from the Governor to do so."

Coleman's team hailed the ruling for giving the state courts space to sort out Coleman's lawsuit.

"This wise ruling will ensure that Harry Reid, Al Franken and Chuck Schumer cannot short-circuit Minnesota law in their partisan power play," Coleman adviser Ben Ginsberg said, referring to two Democratic leaders in the Senate.

Franken attorney Marc Elias said the campaign looks forward to finishing up proceedings in the trial, but he acknowledged the ruling wasn't what Franken attorneys wanted. "Obviously we had hoped for a different result, but we accept the ruling of the Supreme Court," he said.

A three-judge panel listened to oral arguments Friday on a Franken motion to dismiss the lawsuit and a Coleman motion to declare a key recount rule illegal.

On the dismissal motion, attorneys for Coleman sought to defend their legal case, pointing to evidence of inconsistencies and incomplete voter registration records.

While Coleman attorney Jim Langdon acknowledged the court has decreased the number of ballots that can be considered, he referred back to the larger number of up to 11,000 rejected absentee ballots the Coleman campaign still believes might have been counted depending on how election officials applied the rules.

"They've been looked at with different sets of eyes with standards applied differently," Langdon said.

But Judge Denise Reilly sounded skeptical, saying the rejected ballots had been reviewed three times by election officials prior to Coleman's lawsuit. "I don't know if I agree with that statement," she told Langdon.

Acknowledging the court's previous rulings, Coleman's attorneys argued their side had presented evidence showing at least 1,725 ballots should be opened and counted. Further, they argued that evidence the court has seen so far on voters' registration status is unreliable because the state's voter registration database is incomplete and possibly inaccurate.

By Franken's analysis, only nine rejected ballots had been shown to be valid. And Elias said the accuracy of the voter registration database didn't matter, because Coleman could have proven a voter was registered through witness testimony. "Their case is closed," he said.

In other arguments, Coleman is questioning a recount rule that's at the heart of his claim that some people got two votes because both a damaged and replacement ballot for them were counted. Coleman attorney Joe Friedberg said the campaign initially accepted a rule guiding recount officials to count the original ballots, but he said the campaign did so "presuming that there would be an equal number of originals and duplicates."

The problem, Friedberg said, is that some of the duplicates weren't properly marked.

Franken attorney David Lillehaug said both campaigns and the secretary of state's office agreed on the rule, which he said is legal. "The attempt to back out," he said, "is always after Sen. Coleman decides he didn't like the results."

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Norm Coleman was born in New York City in 1949. Al Franken was born in New York City in 1951.

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