Minnesota's canvassing board is set to certify comedian Al Franken as the winner of the Senate race by 225 votes, or less than one-one thousandth of a percent.
The Secretary of State, a Democrat, will announce that he's going to certify the race.
At that point, Republican incumbent Norm Coleman's lawyers will have seven days to file an official election contest.
The adjudication of the contest would be decided by three judges appointed by the state's chief justice,
Does Coleman have a case, or is he simply spitting out sour milk?
The answer, as is almost always the case in election disputes, is that one's perspective fixes the law more than the law fixes one's perspective. Casting a ballot and having it counted accurately seems to be simple, but humans have found ways to inject Heisenberg-scale uncertainties into the process.
Coleman's contest will rest on the claim that the state canvassing board violated election law when it came to precincts where duplicated ballots -- those given to voters whose original ballots were damaged -- were included in the tally along with the original, damanged ballots. That seems suspect, right? But the board's response is that they did their best not to include duplicates in the tally.
And the remedy would be... what, exactly? Discarding ballots that are unmarked duplicates would almost certainly disenfranchise voters -- maybe -- depending upon the external reality of the vote count, which is unknowable -- it would take away more voters from legitimate voters than it would take away second, duplicative voters. Franken's campaign contends that there's no reason to assume that just because, in certain precincts, the number of ballots exceeds the number of people who signed up to vote there, the culprit is duplicate voting and the remedy would be to discard all ballots that can't be matched. In cases where the precinct tallies exceed the voter role tallies, the election contest board will most likely investigate, and this will take time...perhaps more than a month.
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