Coleman Effort Rebuffed

This morning the Coleman campaign asked Minnesota’s Canvassing Board to reconsider its decisions on 16 ballots that it either awarded to Al Franken or decided not to count. The Board denied Coleman’s request, either declining to reconsider its earlier decisions, or reaffirming them.

Coleman’s argument was that the Board’s decisions on these ballots were inconsistent with the judgments it made on other ballots.

So far, at least, Franken seems to have fared better with the Board than Coleman. I’ve seen no public report of the Board’s votes; I believe all of its decisions have been presented as unanimous. So it’s impossible to say, at this point, whether the Democrats’ 3-2 advantage on the Board has been a factor.

The current status of the recount remains unclear. The Minneapolis Star Tribune has Franken with a 46-vote lead, but the Canvassing Board has not endorsed that number. It plans to meet by December 30 “to finalize [its] spreadsheet updating the vote tallies for both candidates, once the withdrawn challenged ballots are reallocated.” Further meetings are contemplated into January, and it appears unlikely that the Canvassing Board will certify a winner before the new Senate convenes on January 6.

The race is going down to the wire, but it appears that the Coleman campaign no longer has the confidence it once did. That is manifested, I think, in today’s 16-vote effort and in the fact that it is now the Coleman campaign that reminds us hopefully that “there are still over a thousand rejected absentee ballots that remain outstanding.”

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