Eric Kleefeld November 29, 2010, 3:14 PM

The ballot challenges are starting to roll in for the Minnesota gubernatorial recount — and more of them coming from Republican nominee Tom Emmer’s campaign than from Democrat Mark Dayton’s, apparently. That said, things still appear to be going smoother than they did in the last statewide recount, from the long and drawn out Senate race in 2008.

The Star-Tribune reports:

According to Hennepin County election manager Rachel Smith, shortly after the recount began the Emmer representatives started filing an increasing number of challenges to would-be Mark Dayton votes that table judges deemed frivolous.

In some precincts “every third or fourth ballot” was challenged by the Emmer camp, Smith said.

…

Dayton lawyer David Lillehaug, asked about reports of frivolous challenges by Emmer representatives, showed a reporter a copy of a ballot from a Minnetonka precinct that an Emmer representative challenged because the oval was not completely filled in. The ovals appeared to almost completely blacked out and the challenge was deemed frivolous.

As The UpTake reports, one counting table in Hennepin had 41 challenges from Team Emmer’s observer — 30 of which were then retracted, after it was explained that write-in votes on other races are not identifying marks, under the state’s prohibition on voters signing their ballots. (There were reportedly some protest vote write-ins on lower offices, such as Minnie Mouse and former Independence Party Gov. Jesse Ventura.) By contrast, the Dayton representative made only three challenges, and withdrew two of them after one was deemed frivolous.

Previously, the 2008 Senate recount saw several thousand challenges of ballots that were lodged by both sides, most of them frivolous. The effect of this was to take those ballots out of the count, pending their adjudication by the State Canvassing Board or the withdrawals of the challenges by the respective campaigns.

This aspect in turn led to both campaigns in an escalating game of making frivolous challenges, if only to counter the other guy’s frivolous challenge at the moment, in order to affect how the count would be tracked in the media. The net effect was that Norm Coleman’s lead of about 200 votes appeared to be steady — only to have Franken pull ahead by less than 50 votes after the challenges were handled.

However, this time things are being done much differently. As we covered last week, the State Canvassing Board decided that a new ban on frivolous challenges would be enforced by continuing to count ballots where the challenge was deemed to be frivolous by the local official at the counting table, with the ballot simultaneously set aside for potential review later on. This means that even if many frivolous challenges are made, they will still be provisionally counted, and thus will not affect the publicly released running totals.

What’s more, because Dayton leads by 8,770 votes out of 2.1 million, there would have to be a lot of legitimate challenges in order to turn things around — an event that seems quite unlikely.

2010 elections, MN-GOV, Mark Dayton, Tom Emmer