Truly appreciate the background information.

(Ritchie impress me more, every single day.)

DW

So much of our State Law regarding recounts is a product of all the decisions made in Anderson v. Rolvaag in 1963, one sometimes forgets that sometimes you really don’t want a court to do something other than follow the precidents of that recount. And apparently that is what is the case here. We just don’t want “settled law” opened up during this recount, because then many other parts of the process would be open to appeal, to new argument, and it is better to stay within the tested precidents that derive from Anderson v. Rolvaag.

What Richie said is that if the candidates/campaigns cannot come to agreement, then the Supreme Court could appoint a magistrate to do certain specific tasks — and one of those could be dealing with the absentee votes. Richie also made another point — if an individual voter knows their ballot is one of the wrongly rejected absentee ballots, they can individually execute a petition to the Supreme Court requesting that their ballot be counted. Don’t need a lawyer or anything fancy, just a petition to the court to count your vote. I suspect Franken’s team has a pretty good idea of which ballots in this class are his, and could easily show up with more than half of that class petitioned, and thinking the Supremes don’t want to spend New Year’s eve looking at ballots — well ad Magistrate can do that job you know…. Richie as much as laid it out in his interview. None of this would go outside the lines of Anderson V. Rolvaag — so it just might be how it ends.

Coleman’s trick today — asking that ballots in piles 1-4 be included, is an interesting trick, but in the end, I don’t think it will help him. He went to court initially to oppose even sorting into the five piles, and lost, and was told to agree to a process, which apparently he did. He did not raise the question of wrongly rejected’s being in piles 1-4, and he lost on the overall question of counting all ballots that did not clearly meet the disqualifications of state law that define those piles, so the scope of the court order in which he has been ordered to participate does not include anything in piles 1-4. It may be that either Franken or the SoS and AG have to go back to the supremes for a clarification of scope — but I don’t think that would take all that long, particularly as the Court apparently reviewed the agreement on rules and process last week, on which they predicated their extension of time.

But it was only listening to Richie today that I finally understood where that order for candidates/campaigns to cooperate came from — it is in Anderson v. Rolvaag. And just too much about how you do a recount in Minnesota Law comes from that leading decision. If the Legislature wants to change it — fine, they can do it when we are not recounting an election, and it may well be they should consider what happens when no agreement can be reached between reasonable sides, but “settled law” should not be busted open on a whim. And this is a conservative court, so they are just being properly conservative and sticking with settled law.

I do think there will be individual petitions, (That possibility is apparently in State Law,) and I expect there will need to be a return to the court for clarification of the scope of their order, (Just Pile Five), but I also think it is almost over.

For those who are not “learned in Minnesota Recount History” the case, Anderson v. Rolvaag was the final Supreme Court decision in a recount of a Governor’s race that ended up on election night favoring Anderson by about 90 votes, and after five months of court going and arguing and finally recounting all the ballots under court supervision, ended up with Karl Rolvaag becoming Governor in March of 1963, by about 90 votes in Rolvaag’s favor.

One could say that precisely recounting elections is something of a Civil Religion in Minnesota. Along with winter ice fishing, it is something to do before the seed companies send you what you ordered and you have to get busy.