Word: coleman
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Tellingly, both sides appear to be girding for more legal battles. Franken attorney Marc Elias recently sent a letter to the Federal Election Commission requesting an expedited advisory opinion about whether the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee can set up two recount funds on Franken's behalf; Coleman's campaign says it agrees with the request. Meanwhile, dozens of GOP leaders solicited donations for Coleman's recount fund via YouTube in late February...
Franken's counsel thought otherwise. On Friday, the panel heard arguments about a request from Franken to dismiss the case altogether because, they argued, Coleman failed to prove that there were enough improperly rejected ballots to close Franken's 225-vote margin. The court is expected to rule on that motion soon. In the meantime, Franken's team has been trying to prove that flaws in the state's election system were the exception, not the rule. He is also attempting to get about 800 absentee ballots tossed into the final tally, most of which are from counties...
Election-law experts say that Coleman has been laying the groundwork for an appeal ever since that mid-February ruling. Indeed, it's not rare these days to hear Coleman's attorneys claim the ruling violated the equal-protections clause of the U.S. Constitution. "The court has given him very narrow opportunity for establishing proof or establishing evidence as to what ballots are going be counted," notes David Schultz, a professor at Hamline University and the University of Minnesota who is an expert in election law. "It still leaves the court with what looks like an inconsistency. But that...
...desperate to have someone go to Washington right away. A recent Rasmussen poll of 500 Minnesotans found that about 46% supported conducting another election altogether. "I think that since this issue landed in front of a panel of three judges, it has become increasingly clumsy," says James Crockarell, a Coleman voter. "The election is now in the hands of the court and out of the hands of the people. The fairest thing that speaks to the people is to have a new election...
That only fuels the suspicion, voiced by Franken, that the GOP wants to drag out Coleman's legal battle as long as it can to delay the Democrats from gaining another vote in the Senate, which would bring them even closer to a filibuster-proof 60-vote majority. "They're willing to let Minnesota have one Senator in order to delay my getting there," Franken recently told the Associated Press. For his part, Coleman has said he is "not in this to prolong it" but "to get it right" - though his decision to attend meetings with his former GOP colleagues...