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Franken Legal Team Officially Rests Its Case

Franken attorney David Lillehaug just announced in court that Team Franken is done with its witnesses, and subject to some pending submissions of evidence from the Coleman side, "I am honored to say that contestee Al Franken rests his case."

The Franken legal team took only a week and a half to makes its case, after having also covered a lot of ground during Coleman's five weeks at bat.

The Franken legal team brought in a few more rejected absentee voters today, to testify about their circumstances. They also lodged objections to attempts by Team Coleman to introduce new evidence relating to voters they want to advocate for in the rebuttal phase, with the Franken lawyers saying that Coleman can only rebut Franken's arguments -- he cannot reopen his own case and fill in the remaining gaps. Judgments from the court are still pending on these objections.

They also questioned Clay County Auditor Lori Johnson about a precinct where nine ballots were randomly removed on Election Night after they had a surplus compared to the number of people on the roster. (Professor David Schultz of Hamline University tells me this practice is not inconsistent with state law, and is commonly used in this situation.) There were another five ballots also missing during the recount -- apparently all of them for Franken -- with a net loss of seven votes for Franken in a precinct that Norm Coleman had won to begin with.

Also, further progress was made in the separate petition from 61 Franken voters to have their ballots counted. Attorney Charlie Nauen, who has already obtained permission for 35 previously-rejected absentee ballots to be counted in motions for summary judgment, brought in a handful of witnesses who still had outstanding disputes of fact.


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They also questioned Clay County Auditor Lori Johnson about a precinct where nine ballots were randomly removed on Election Night after they had a surplus compared to the number of people on the roster. (Professor David Schultz of Hamline University tells me this practice is not inconsistent with state law, and is commonly used in this situation.)

What??!?? Does this practice make sense to anyone? "Hmmm. Looks like we messed up somewhere. Heck. Let's compound the problem by randomly disenfranchising a couple voters."

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I had the same reaction. This is essentially what Coleman has asked the judges to do. In precincts where ballots were counted that do not meet the Feb 13 criteria, he wanted them to arbitrarily reduce the number of counted ballots by that amount.

Franken's lawyers have argued pretty vehemently that such a practice would violate established law, so I'm a little perplexed at Prof. Shultz's suggestion that it is not inconsistent with state law.

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come on Al! The Senate and the country needs your voice and vote!

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Assuming the scope of his rebuttal is limited in the way the Franken lawyers want, how long should Coleman's rebuttal take to finish? (Another 5 weeks...?)

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Friedberg has until tomorrow morning to sort out some paperwork that he wanted to enter into evidence. Apparently they had everything in there but the kitchen sink in no particular order. A number of their submissions have looked like this. I don't believe he has any further witnesses.

I believe both sides are scheduled for approx. 1 hr each for summation tomorrow. Ginsberg-in-the-hallway was suggesting that it would be live on network tv, but Ginsberg-in-the-hallway says a lot of things.

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