No matter how many times you tell Norm Coleman's legal team that it's generally illegal to sign somebody else's name on a legal document, they're just not giving up on it.

Coleman lawyer Joe Friedberg is going over rejected ballots one by one with Dakota County elections manager Kevin Boyle. And again we've come to the matter of a fake signature on an absentee ballot application -- though at least this time the person signing the name was admitting it up front.

A voter's mother signed his name to the absentee application, writing "mother" right next to it in parentheses. Thus the signature on the ballot envelope itself -- possibly the voter's -- didn't match the one of the application. Friedberg couldn't let it go:

Friedberg: Now, is it your position that if somebody signs the application with the permission of the voter, that does not make it a lawful application, or it does make it a lawful application?

Boyle: In the case of the regular absentee ballot applications, we would need the mark or the signature of the applicant, not the applicant's mother.

Friedberg: Is that because you would need it to compare to the voter's signature on the ballot, on the envelope?

Boyle: That's one of the reasons.

At this point Friedberg quietly moved on to the next ballot in his stack.

It could have been worse. A while ago, Friedberg was declaring that he didn't care about the rules forbidding this.