Other News From Minnesota
A few more points from the Minnesota trial today, besides the huge mess involving breached donor data from the Coleman campaign:
• After Franken lawyer Kevin Hamilton announced that the campaign was postponing the resting of their case, from today to some time tomorrow, lead Coleman attorney Joe Friedberg asked for another day to begin his rebuttal. The judges said no, they expect a rebuttal to begin tomorrow, as well.
• The Coleman lawyers have served subpoenas to local officials, seeking more evidence on voters who were among the 3-A ballots, to be presented during their rebuttal. The Franken camp moved to quash the subpoenas, and argued a motion in limine to prevent such evidence from being admitted on the grounds that Team Coleman has rested their case, and previously gave no indication that they wanted to leave the case open in this respect. A judgment from the court is still pending.
• At his post-court press conference, lead Franken attorney Marc Elias argued that the Coleman camp's new spreadsheet of 1,360 is riddled with missing evidence -- and in some cases they argue that the state voter database will eventually have the information they need, rather than actively seeking to prove their case. "My spreadsheet had them at nine," Elias said. "Their spreadsheet has them at zero. So they may want to reconsider whether they agree with my spreadsheet."
• Coleman legal spokesman Ben Ginsberg insisted that they have proven these voters -- more than enough to re-elect Norm Coleman -- under the court's standards. But he also implied that a lenient standard will be required: "We think that under Minnesota law as it was practiced in all 87 counties on Election Day, we absolutely have proved the case that all those votes should be counted." What this likely means is that many of these ballots will be rejected, and are being saved for an appeal -- in fact, Ginsberg complained of inconsistent standards in decisions to let rejected Franken-voters in.
• The court just handed down an opinion on Coleman's attempt to submit certified forms from the counties -- either a copy of a document, or a certification that no document such as an absentee-voter application was found after a diligent search -- and Franken's attempts to stop it. The court accepted some of them, granted an extension of five days to receive an official seal on others, threw out statements from Anoka County as going too far, and also threw out some others as having been submitted too late last week.
(Coleman presser c/o The Uptake.)
















Having listened to Franken's atty's motion to quash, a couple of interesting points were made:
1. The subpoenas were sent out last night around 11 p.m. requesting that various county officials around the state gather up specified info Coleman wants.
2. The officials were given 24 hrs. to respond.
3. Franken's attys claim that the info being requested is exactly the info identified in their spreadsheet as being missing with regard to Coleman's claims.
4.Franken's atty also claim that the info in question was omitted in the presentation of Coleman's case as a tactical decision, and that MN law specifically precludes such evidence to be presented after a side rests.
5. Coleman's attys claim that it's all a plot to deprive the good voters of MN of their vote.
6. Coleman's attys plan to claim again that all the ballots rejected in the ruling of Feb 13 need to be counted; this would be the ones missing one or more elements necessary for legality to be established-that pesky legal vote thing.
I'm not sure why the judges didn't rule on this immediately - they did go off to discuss it for a bit. My guess is they're being excessively cautious, but the result is a lot of public officials having to scramble on a very short timeline for things that should have been gathered weeks ago. But then, Coleman doesn't really think the law applies to him, so if they didn't present this stuff as part of their case, so what?
March 11, 2009 9:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
I am not a lawyer and I know Judges do not want to leave anything ripe for appeal. But surely this can't be the way our justice system was intened to work.
March 11, 2009 11:16 PM | Reply | Permalink