Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie’s (D) office has released a proposed schedule for the expected gubernatorial recount — and the state could be cutting it close on this one.
As the Star-Tribune reports, the schedule calls for a State Canvassing Board meeting on November 23, to certify the initial election results and determine the need for any recounts. As of right now, Democratic former U.S. Sen. Mark Dayton’s lead over Republican state Rep. Tom Emmer is slightly under the 0.5% margin that would trigger a mandatory hand recount.
The recount would then begin on November 29, with a deadline of December 7 for local officials to finish sorting and counting the ballots. The canvassing board would then meet on December 8-10 to sort through any disputed ballots, and then certify the results on December 14.
This schedule, if carried out successfully, would actually make the recount process end about three weeks sooner than it did for the 2008 Senate recount between incumbent Republican Sen. Norm Coleman and Democratic activist and comedian Al Franken.
However, it should be noted that Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s term is scheduled to end on January 3. If this process were to drag out — say, with a months-long legal contest like what happened in the Senate race — Pawlenty would continue to serve as governor in the interim. And as a bonus for him, he would have a Republican-led legislature, which he never had during his two regular terms.
There is some reason to think/hope that this process might not drag out anywhere near as badly as the Senate recount did. First, Dayton’s current margin of just under 9,000 vote is about 30 times anything that Coleman or Franken ever had, and past experience suggests that there is probably not enough leeway in the numbers to change the result. (The 2008 recount/contest process only results in a net margin shift of about 500 votes.)
And furthermore, the state now has a vast amount of case law and legal precedent from the Senate election, which is presumably almost all still current from the previous recount having happened so recently.
Eric Kleefeld
Eric Kleefeld joined TPM as an intern for the final months of the 2006 midterm elections, and then kept showing up for work. His other interests include guitars, old comic books and the politics of various English-speaking countries.
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