All eyes are turned towards upstate New York today for NY-20’s special election, and I should have a liveblog later tonight to follow the results. But we now have major news breaking out of Minnesota: Nearly three weeks after the lawyers rested their case in Norm Coleman’s election contest, the three-judge panel finally released a ruling. (You can read the full decision here.)
The ruling favors Al Franken, and it all but closes the door to Coleman’s hopes for a comeback via rejected absentee ballots.
Ever since Coleman found himself trailing by 225 votes, he has been trying to convince judges to include a large enough pool of currently invalid ballots to have a chance at overtaking Franken. The Republican’s lawyers started by clamoring for 11,000 absentee ballots to be counted, but a series of court rulings forced them to narrow that number to 4,800 than 3,000 and then 1,700. Today, the court tossed out most of the ballots whose inclusion Republicans were asking and left the door open to only 400.
These 400 ballots will now be assembled for final review, and only those that are found to conform to statutes requirement will be included in the final tally. “Not every absentee ballot identified in this order will be ultimately be opened and counted,” the judges wrote. In short: The number of rejected absentee ballots that might find their way in the count is at most 400 - and probably much lower.
This developments is a blow to Coleman’s chances for two reasons:
- How many ballots: Even if all 400 ballots are found to be valid, it remains far too small a number for Coleman to close his 225-vote deficit - especially when you take into account the fact that some of these ballots are sure to have gone to third-party candidate Barkley (who got about 16% statewide) or have been cast as deliberate undervotes. In short: Coleman would need to win an immense majority of the remaining ballots to cut into Franken’s lead - let alone to overtake him.
a - Which ballots: That Coleman could muster an immense majority is made very unlikely by the fact that these 400 ballots were not all votes that the Republican wanted to see added to the count; a fair number are ballots Franken’s lawyers were arguing should be tallied. In particular, half of the ballots come from heavily Democratic Hennepin, Ramsey and St. Louis counties. (On the other hand, all three of these counties contain Republican-leaning suburbs.)
Worse still, the judges rejected the substance of Coleman’s argument and dismissed his contention that they should be lenient when determining an absentee ballot’s eligibility. For instance, the court ruled that voters needed to sign absentee ballot applications and they needed to sign the return envelopes that contain their ballots. The Coleman camp had argued that the court should overlook these requirements, but the judges disagreed. “[Coleman] argued that a voter could not obtain an absentee ballot without first completing an absentee ballot application and that the court could presume the existence of the application,” they wrote. “The court was unwilling to make this presumption.”
This trial focused on issues other than rejected absentee ballots. As far as I can tell, however, the court did not rule on other topics - whether Coleman’s complaint that more than 100 Franken votes were double-counted or the questions surrounding the Minneapolis ballots that were counted in Franken’s tally even though they were not found during the recount. Yet, there is no doubt that rejected absentee ballots were Coleman’s main path to salvation. His failure to get a favorable ruling on this issue could make the court’s later decisions on the other subjects largely irrelevant.
We shall know more on April 7th: Judges ordered these 400 ballots to be counted on that day. The candidate left trailing at the end of this process is expected to appeal, and the case would presumably be short-cutted to the state Supreme Court. That could take a while (Senator Cornyn just suggested it would take “years” to resolve this mess, which would obviously be convenient for Republicans), but we are finally seeing the end of the tunnel in Minnesota’s Senate race!
This isn’t a suprise, and it is very likely that Coleman would lose an appeal to the MN Supreme Court as well. Ever since Franken got his 225 vote lead certified, Coleman has mainly stayed in the race to help Republicans deny Democrats a 59th seat in the US Senate. There is no hope for Coleman to overtake Franken now, his only hope would be perhaps for the U.S. Supreme Court to hear his case and eventually order a new election. Although with Minnesotans being sick of having just one U.S. Senator, Coleman’s prospects at a revote would worsen dramatically, although Franken is not very well liked in Minnesota either.