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5K rejected Minn. Senate ballots get another look
The judges in Minnesota's Senate election trial threw Republican Norm Coleman a lifeline on Tuesday, opening the door to adding nearly 5,000 rejected absentee ballots to a race that Democrat Al Franken leads by just 225 votes.It wasn't a total victory for Coleman, who had wanted the judges to look at about 11,000 such ballots. He also has to prove the absentees were unfairly rejected, and it's likely that Franken would gain votes from the pile too. But his attorneys had said the absentees were the centerpiece of his court challenge, and they cheered the ruling. "This is a victory for thousands of Minnesotans whose rejected absentee ballots will now be properly reviewed in this election," Coleman attorney Ben Ginsberg said in a prepared statement. While the judges limited Coleman's field of potential new votes, they allowed many more ballots than Franken had wanted. His attorneys had argued Coleman should be limited to about 650 the specific figure given in his initial Jan. 6 lawsuit. The judges, however, ruled that the Jan. 6 filing laid out additional categories of ballots that should be examined. The judges said they would look at two categories of rejected absentees: those where it appeared the voter had met the legal requirements, and those where voters might have run afoul of the law through no fault of their own. Posted by: ed 2009-02-04 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=261630 |