Word: recountings
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...matter has still not been resolved. Ever since the recount was completed, the two campaigns have been fighting over crucial handful of ballots that are being challenged for one reason or another. On Friday, Franken won a round in court when a state elections board ruled that more than 600 rejected absentee ballots could be sorted and counted, and that 133 missing ballots from Minneapolis could be counted by examining the tapes from a ballot counting machine. Coleman promptly said he would challenge the ruling in court...
...That's exactly what's going on in Minnesota, where 2.9 million voters left Senator Norm Coleman just 215 votes ahead of Saturday Night Live star Al Franken. Since then, both sides have politely allowed a legally required hand recount to take place, one with very clearly specified rules and no scheduled end date. But the recount ended on Dec. 5, just as Minnesota's secretary of state said it would, and the result didn't differ much from the initial count. "We didn't have to do a lot of overtime," says Cindy Reichert, the elections director of Minneapolis...
...their votes invalidated by accident. The 133 missing ballots, from example, were in an envelope from the not-exactly-shenanigans-prone University Lutheran Church of Hope in Minneapolis that got counted late on election night, then transported to a warehouse, and seem to have gone missing in the recount. Everyone spent a day combing the place for the envelope as if they were on a CSI episode, but to no avail. "You'd love to find it," says Mark Ritchie, Minnesota's secretary of state. "Out of 3 million ballots, to have one envelope missing, you know, darn...
...Franken side is pushing for more ballots to be included in the recount, partly because it has nothing to lose (it's behind) and partly because, historically, Democrats screw up their ballots more often than Republicans. They're the shaky-handed elderly, the movement-limited disabled, the instruction-confused immigrants, the first-time-voting minorities. But despite this tension, the two law teams have been pleasant toward each other. Franken lead attorney Marc Elias, who was head counsel for the John Kerry campaign, says, "It's been cordial. I've met Coleman's lawyer, Mr. Knaak, three times. He seems...
...declare a winner before Christmas, well before the U.S. Senate is seated on Jan. 6. The five-member board was chosen by Democratic secretary of state Ritchie, but both sides are satisfied with his appointments. To prepare himself, Ritchie not only watched HBO's movie about the Florida recount, but he watched it in a particularly Minnesotan way. "I was especially interested in the bonus features of the disc," he says. Meantime, reviewing the wacky ballots - available to the public as PDF files - is by far the most popular activity on the Minneapolis - St. Paul Star Tribune website...