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MN Supreme Court Order Locks Coleman In On Request To Count More Absentee Ballots

I am glad someone finally said it -- Hennepin County's reply to the Coleman objection to not including certain rejected absentee ballots in the vote count:

[T]his Court [the Minnesota Supreme Court] established a uniform standard for determining which ballots could be forwarded to the Secretary of State for counting. Those ballots must be identified by local election officials as rejected in error and the campaigns must agree with that assessment. In other words, only ballots which the local officials and the two campaigns agree were rejected in error will be passed on to the Secretary of State’s Office.

(Emphasis supplied.) The Minnesota Supreme Court will have to judge its own order to be flawed in order to grant Coleman relief. Of course the initial order requiring agreement from both parties was indeed seriously flawed, as dissenting Justice Alan Page noted at the time:

The court's order may seek the peaceful way out by asking the campaigns to agree on improperly rejected ballots. But the order does not guarantee that the candidates and their political parties will agree on any rejected ballot. Instead, the court's order will arbitrarily disqualify enfranchised voters on the whim of the candidates and political parties without the benefit of the legislatively authorized procedures in section 204C.39.

Indeed. The only thing that stopped this from being a complete train wreck was the fact that Franken took the lead. Otherwise, Coleman would not have accepted any absentee ballots at all. Now that Coleman is behind, he went scrounging for more ballots to count. All so predictable. And Justice Page predicted it.

Speaking for me only

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