MN Supreme Court To Hear US Senate Recount Case

Minnesota's closest election in decades is headed to the state's highest court before the recount is even finished.   The Minnesota Supreme Court today scheduled a hearing for Wednesday at 1pm to hear the Norm Coleman campaign's suit to stop the counting of improperly rejected absentee ballots.

In scheduling the hearing, the court made no comment on the merit of Coleman's claim that there are no uniform standards for counting the absentee ballots.   It did refuse to grant a temporary restraining order that would have stopped the counting.  Instead, it asked counties to keep the envelope that the absentee ballot came in and have a way of identifying which ballots were originally rejected.

The Franken campaign says Hennepin County is going ahead with sorting and counting the improperly rejected absentee ballots.  Hennepin County has the largest population of all Minnesota counties.

The court ordered:

Documents in the case must be filed by Noon Tomorrow (Tuesday December 16, 2008) and replies to those filings must be filed by 4:30 PM

That the Secretary of State "shall inform the court of the final date by which a original certificate of election must be delivered to the secretary of the United States Senate for the person elected on November 4 to take office."

You can read the entire text of the court's order here.

Video of the Minnesota Supreme Court hearing will be carried live by The UpTake.

Challenges trimmed

The Franken campaign says it has cut its number of challenged ballot to 436.  According to Franken Communications Director Andy Barr the two campaigns met at the Secretary of State's office today to discuss tomorrow's canvassing board meeting.  The Franken campaign produced a list of 436 ballots that it will continue to challenge.  Barr said the Coleman campaign had no such list.


Last week several judges on the Canvassing Board indicated that they did not want to consider challenges that were frivolous.   Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie has said he thinks the most challenges the board could consider in the four days it has to review ballots would be 1,000.

Canvassing Board meeting delayed

The State Canvassing Board has moved the start time of its meeting on challenged ballots from 9am to Noon because the Coleman campaign had not submitted its whittled down list of challenged ballots by 2pm Monday.  Secretary of State staff will start sorting out the challenged and now unchallenged ballots at 8am Tuesday.