Coleman going to court over duplicates
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The campaign for Republican Norm Coleman is headed to court over the issue of duplicate ballots in the recount (UPDATE: Here's the petition). The State Canvassing Board rejected Coleman's plea to have certain ballots thrown out at this morning's hearing. Several members of the board said the best remedy is the courts, which Coleman's campaign is now following. Here's the release:
ST. PAUL - In a petition filed with the Minnesota Supreme Court today, the Coleman for Senate campaign has requested the Court to prevent the Minnesota State Canvassing Board from including double-counted votes in its recount totals. The petition seeks to have precincts which now have more votes than voters reconcile their ballots so that the Canvassing Board's numbers are accurate. The campaign also asks that the Court imposes the vote totals in these precincts as recorded on Election Night if the originals and duplicates cannot be reconciled. The campaign further asks that this reconciliation process be part of the process the Court ordered yesterday for improperly rejected absentee ballots. That process must be completed by December 31.
Minnesota law requires local election officials to make a duplicate ballot if an original is damaged during the election night counting process. The officials are supposed to mark all such ballots as "duplicate" ballots and to segregate the original ballots which were damaged and therefore not counted on election night. The problem arose during the hand recount when duplicate ballots could not be found to match the originals because election officials had not marked them as duplicates on election night. The precincts challenged as part of this action are ones where BOTH the originals and duplicates were tabulated in the recount, as evidenced by there now being more votes than voters in those precincts. The effect is that some voters have had their vote counted twice.
The Coleman campaign last night proposed that the campaigns agree on a method for resolving these obvious errors. The Franken campaign rejected the proposal. According to Fritz Knaak, lead attorney for Coleman for Senate, it was hoped that both campaigns could have reached an agreement on this issue and prevented the need for court action. The Canvassing Board members have acknowledged an error with the count, but they said today they lacked the statutory authority to reconcile the obvious errors. That led to the Coleman campaign filing this action with the Minnesota Supreme Court.
"We are disappointed the Franken Campaign would not join us in finding a resolution to this serious problem. Unfortunately, without that resolution, the State Canvassing Board has made it clear they will have to count some Minnesotan's votes twice. This means that millions of other Minnesota voters are being disenfranchised by the influence of hundreds of duplicate ballots that simply should not be counted. We respect the decision of the Board Members who have said that without an agreement by the campaigns they are powerless to remedy this matter. In order to ensure the integrity of the final results of the recount, the Canvassing Board must be provided clearer direction by the Supreme Court that such double-counting not only violates the Constitution, but also the sole purpose of the Canvassing Board which is to certify a recount only of the ballots counted on election night and not certify numbers which result in more ballots being counted than persons that voted on election day."
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