Franken campaign: 'Panicking' Coleman team lying about duplicate ballots

Nick Juliano Published: Thursday December 18, 2008
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Over the last several days, Republican Sen. Norm Coleman's campaign has raised concerns about the possibility that some ballots in the Minnesota Senate race would be counted twice.

Democratic challenger Al Franken filed a brief Thursday rebutting those concerns and charging the Coleman camp with reversing its previous position on duplicate ballots because it now fears losing the closely fought recount.

"The Coleman campaign is going to lose this recount, and now that they've figured that out, they're panicking," Franken communications director Andy Barr said in a press release. "Now they are lying again. This is a bogus issue. And this desperate ploy goes beyond trying to change the rules in the middle of the game - it's trying to change the rules after you've already lost the game."

At issue are duplicate ballots, which election judges create if original absentee ballots cannot be read by vote-scanning machines. Judges are supposed to mark the duplicate ballots and set aside the originals. Such duplicates usually are used to replace overseas absentee ballots, which are printed on regular computer paper and mailed to a voter's precinct, as MinnPost's Eric Black explains.

Heading into this year's recount, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie issued instructions to the counties on how to handle questions that might arise. In the matter of the duplicates, his instruction was to count the originals and set aside the duplicates. This was a new policy that Smith and Mansky said had not been followed in previous recounts.

In some precincts, this created a situation where there were more votes than voters, which probably increases the likelihood that those were cases where the duplicates were made and counted, but not labeled (and since they weren't labeled, they couldn't be set aside, according to the secretary of state's instructions). That's why the Coleman campaign is now complaining that Ritchie's policy created the double counting of more than 100 ballots.

From the Franken brief:

If the Board were to eliminate all originals at this point, it would - by definition - necessarily disenfranchise all of those voters, which would include all of the ballots properly duplicated by counties during the course of the recount in reliance upon the rules adopted by the Secretary of State and this Board. Such a sweeping disenfranchisement would be unprecedented in Minnesota history.

The brief includes emails from Coleman attorney Tony Trimble to the Secretary of State's office like the following from November 19:

TRIMBLE: We believe that duplicate ballots should be counted if no corresponding original can be found, as this was a ballot cast on election night. A challenge to a duplicate ballot for which no original can be found is a frivolous challenge, because it does not relate to voter intent. Any challenge to a duplicate ballot should be made within an election contest and is not within the limited jurisdiction of an administrative recount. We will request the Minnesota State Canvassing Board to reject any challenges to duplicate ballots as groundless and frivolous (if the same are brought to the Canvassing Board).