For part three of today's legal proceedings in Minnesota, where the state Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Norm Coleman's appeal of his defeat at the election trial, let's take a look at when lead Coleman attorney Joe Friedberg came back for a 10-minute response period after Franken's lead attorney Marc Elias had a turn at bat.

Friedberg again complained that the trial court did not allow him to put in evidence of unequal treatment of absentee ballots across the state. "I repeatedly tried to get that evidence in, and repeatedly could not," said Friedberg. He added in even stronger terms: "I couldn't get it in, and I tried to the point where I strained the court's patience. I didn't want to go any further than that. These judges were very well-tempered."

Justice Christopher Dietzen asked about the Coleman camp's allegations of ballots having been improperly accepted under a standard of strict compliance with the law -- which the Coleman camp is arguing against, in order to get more votes in. Dietzen went back to the quote used by lead Franken lawyer Marc Elias, that "every ballot tells a story," and we can't immediately conclude a single ballot was improperly accepted without knowing about the circumstances. "Well we don't have the story," said Dietzen, "so how do we judge?"

"Well first, Your Honor, that may be the biggest non sequitur in the history of Anglo-American jurisprudence," Friedberg replied. He said the face of the ballot envelope is evidence enough to conclude what has happened.

"We put a sprinkling in of hundreds from just Minneapolis and St. Louis County, and statistically sure, there might be an official error here, or there might be a replacement ballot there," said Friedberg, but surely in most cases there was a genuine mistake.

Justice Alan Page replied: "A sprinkling doesn't help us, does it?"

"Sure, we extrapolate in life," said Friedberg. He later said, "our burden of proof is to make it more likely than not, not prove it so nobody has any doubt."

Page went back to an argument that Team Coleman had made during the initial litigation on absentee ballots back in December 2008 -- arguing explicitly for a strict standard -- and asking whether this is consistent. "No it's not consistent, but you're going back to a time when we believed that election judges uniformly followed the law and that they followed the law as it was written," said Friedberg. He added: "when we realized that whether your vote counted depended on where you voted, we changed it."

Later, Justice Paul Anderson asked Friedberg bluntly whether he was alleging outright criminality by election officials: "Is there any evidence of any fraud, any favoritism, or anything other than the election officials in Minnesota tried to do the best job possible to apply the law?"

"Absolutely not," said Friedberg. "And there's no voter fraud, there's no election fraud." He then explained: "what's happening now is, there's a great motion in this country and this state to vote absentee," and the increased strain on the system resulted in what became material violations of due process and/or equal protection. This stipulation that there was no outright criminality or favoritism towards one candidate or another could be yet another blow against Coleman.

On the final point, Friedberg said that there was simply an inability to challenge improperly-cast absentee ballots at the polls, in order to ensure a strict standard. "Maybe theoretically, Your Honor, but the testimony in this case from [state and local election officials] Mr. Mansky, Ms. Reichert, Mr. Gelbmann and Mr. Poser -- I asked a question, do challengers have anything to do with absentee voting at this time? And the answer was no, absolutely not."