I'm going to reproduce an article in yesterday's Star Tribune newspaper, including the wildly inapt headline. Here's the whole thing:
Norm Coleman reaches out to Franken on absentee ballots
Norm Coleman sent his U.S. Senate opponent a "Dear Al" letter on Saturday, asking him to "join forces" and agree that 12,000 ballots that may have been wrongly excluded from the November election results be examined.
"If you feel that tactically you cannot join this effort," the Republican told DFLer Al Franken, "we would at least ask that your campaign does nothing to block this suit from moving forward or makes any public statements which could be construed as standing in the way of this suit moving forward."
The Franken campaign could not be reached for comment.
Coleman legal spokesman Ben Ginsberg held a conference call with reporters on Saturday and the two-page letter was then e-mailed to news outlets.
The letter came after a three-judge panel Friday denied Coleman's bid to conduct a wide new inspection of ballots for evidence that many were improperly counted or wrongly rejected during the recount.
A trial on Coleman's challenge of the recount that put Franken ahead by 225 votes is scheduled to begin Monday.
In the web edition of the paper, a commenter begins the job of deconstruction:
This makes it look like a magnanimous gesture by Coleman. A more accurate headline would be Coleman Asks Franken To Support His Bid To Count Select Groups Of Properly Rejected Ballots. Anything else is just quoting Coleman's press release. Sorry, but facts are facts, and the fact that all of these ballots have been reviewed two or three times should appear in paragraph one or two of this story.
To which I would add that this absurd letter should be understood in the context of Coleman, trailing now by more votes than he previously was contesting, "casting a wider net." Minn. Stat. Sec. 203B.12 is the applicable statute and it describes how election judges are to mark as "accepted" envelopes holding returned absentee ballots that meet the following four criteria:
(1) the voter's name and address on the return envelope are the same as the information provided on the absentee ballot application;
(2) the voter's signature on the return envelope is the genuine signature of the individual who made the application for ballots and the certificate has been completed as prescribed in the directions for casting an absentee ballot, except that if a person other than the voter applied for the absentee ballot under applicable Minnesota Rules, the signature is not required to match;
(3) the voter is registered and eligible to vote in the precinct or has included a properly completed voter registration application in the return envelope; and
(4) the voter has not already voted at that election, either in person or by absentee ballot.
There is no other reason for rejecting an absentee ballot.
During the recount phase, the Minnesota Supreme Court directed local election officials to identify wrongly rejected ballots--that is, ballots that were rejected despite meeting the above four criteria--so that those that the campaigns agreed had been wrongly rejected could be opened and counted. When this process was complete, about 900 additional ballots had been added to the tally, and Franken's lead had grown from about 50 to 225--a margin that could not be overcome even if all the issues Coleman had so far raised were resolved in his favor. His campaign therefore is now on an expedition trying to find more issues and ballots.
That is more background for the spot-on remarks of the online commentator. The election officials already have performed the task of identifying wrongly rejected ballots. The 12,000 additional ballots that are now the subject of Coleman's unctuous letter were, in the view of local officials performing the duties assigned to them by Minnesota law, correctly rejected: they did not meet at least one of the four standards. Of course Coleman wants at least some of them counted anyway, because he is behind, and will lose unless something changes. But this suit is on the face of it a loser. To achieve the election result he wants, Coleman is seeking a judicial decision overturning Minnesota election law. What he needs is new rules and only a judge can provide them. A Republican, he's against "judicial activism," but any port in a storm.
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