Coleman Camp Seeks Uniform Ballot Standard
Fritz Knaak, lead counsel for Sen. Norm Coleman's campaign, expressed concern today that some ballots cast in the MN Senate race will be double counted, and he renewed the GOPer's call for a "consistent or uniform standard" for tallying challenged ballots.
Knaak said he would like the Canvassing Board, which meets tomorrow, to hold off on counting rejected ballots without such standards -- and the Coleman campaign has appealed to the state Supreme Court to halt counting in the meantime. Knaak said guidelines are instrumental in preventing the Senate contest "from ending up like the debacle in Florida," a reference, of course, to the contested 2000 presidential race.
The Coleman camp is also reducing its number of challenges to 1,000 or less; Democrat Al Franken's team has reduced theirs to fewer than 500. At one point the two camps were challenging a total of 6K ballots.
Knaak was less clear about the number of double-counted ballots in play.
"We have found where in fact duplicate ballots were cast," he said on a call with reporters. "I can't give you an exact number right now, but it's well into the low hundreds."
He said in situations where the original and duplicate ballots are being counted, those voters are given an "unfair" advantage. The camp is asking the state Supreme Court to reject including duplicate ballots in the final count.
(JENNIFER SKALKA)
Why are Republicans always against counting all the ballots and honor the basic principle of any democracy? The morons who want to bring democracy to other countries do not even honor the basic democratic norms in their own country!
The election board consisting of republicans, democrats and supreme court judges gave unanimous decision to count all the ballots. Coleman is a cry baby because he knows he may loose if all the ballots are counted.