Constitutional Law

Minn. Election Case Winding Way Through Courts

The last leg of Norm Coleman’s re-election campaign for the Senate is a “rather liberal reading of Bush v. Gore,” according to Election Law Blog.

Across Minnesota, counties have varying standards for validating votes. Republican Norm Coleman has made these differences the focal point of his legal challenge to certified election results which still list Democratic challenger Al Franken as having a 225-vote lead. Coleman hopes to overcome this deficit by persuading a three-judge panel that rejected absentee ballots ought to be counted.

“Carver County rejected 181 of its absentee ballots because the witnesses were unregistered,” Coleman legal spokesman Ben Ginsberg told reporters. “Scott County said they don’t even check for that. That presents a classic case of the voters of one county having a greater chance of being disenfranchised than the other county.”

The Star Tribune of Minneapolis reports that “Coleman’s camp has often raised the possibility that the conduct of absentee voting in Minnesota violated the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution.”

Franken attorney Marc Elias counters that the thrust of Coleman’s argument would “do away with county involvement altogether and we’re going to move to a national elections board.”

Full post as published by ACS Blog on February 18, 2009 (boomark / email).