In a potentially decisive ruling, a panel of three judges today ordered up to 400 new absentee ballots opened and counted, far fewer than Republican Norm Coleman had sought in his effort to overcome a lead held by DFLer Al Franken.
The ballots appear to include many that Franken had identified as wrongly rejected as well as ballots that Coleman wanted opened. About half come from Hennepin, Ramsey and St. Louis counties, places Franken won by significant margins. …
Coleman had asked the panel early in the trial to consider counting 4,800 rejected absentee ballots. But rulings by the judges effectively narrowed the field to less than 3,000, and Coleman ended up asking the panel to count 1,369 and consider roughly another 400 rejected by him and Franken during the recount.
Norm Coleman’s hopeless zombie attempts to overturn the results of this election are dealt a mortal blow – though that won’t, apparently, stop him from appealing.
Memo to Harry Reid: Seat Al Franken now. Love, Swing State.
Hopefully, the MN Supreme Court will uphold these judges and the entire recount and let Franken be certified the winner. Hopefully we won’t have to wait while the Republicans drag this dead horse to the US Supreme Court.
This will definitely get appealed to the Minnesota Supreme Court and I think they will come out with a decision relatively quickly (in a month or two tops). At that point, hopefully, the Minnesota SoS and Pawlenty certify Franken the winner even if there’s an appeal to the US Supreme Court or a new federal court case. If Pawlenty refuses, there needs to be a PR campaign against him. The MN legislature also needs to change the law to make it clear that a candidate should be seated provisionally (like all other states) even if all legal proceedings have not ended. I don’t think we can or should seat Franken without a certificate–it will look bad and we’ll lose the PR battle. We need to get him a certificate of winning the election ASAP and then ram it through if the republicans are still refusing to seat him. I don’t think they’ll fight if he has a certificate however.
Link to the order is here http://minnesota.publicradio.o…
Haven’t read it yet, but glad to see it was a 3-0 opinion.
We’ll agree to leave the seat vacant until the US Supreme Court smacks your frivolous asses down, and we can kill the filibuster. How’s that for a bipartisan compromise?