franken-coleman-court.thumbnail.jpgGeez, no wonder Bogus Ben Ginsberg looked and sounded dispirited in his afternoon presscon today.  Not only did the Minnesota Supreme Court last week hand down a decision that deep-sixes the GOP/Coleman strategy of looking to the Federal courts for relief on appeal, but today Team Coleman’s hopes of getting the ballot universe expanded with more votes for Coleman just got a swift kick in the ass, as the ballots he was counting on from pile 3a evaporated upon examination: 

Republican Norm Coleman had hoped an inspection of secrecy envelopes holding rejected absentee ballots would yield enough additional votes to help him cut into Democrat Al Franken’s 225-vote lead. But only 89 of roughly 1,600 inspected envelopes contained valid registration that might allow the ballots to be counted.

Even if every single one of those 89 ballots was a Coleman ballot — and two-thirds of the remaining pile 3as come from counties that Coleman won last November –  that’s less than half of what Norm needs to catch up to Franken, much less overtake him.  

Remember last week when we saw that Franken’s lead attorney, Marc Elias, was telling us that the amount of actual, provable, countable ballots that was in the thousand-plus rejected ballot pile that Coleman wanted counted was in the dozens?  Guess what – Elias was right.  Again.  And with his effort to argue the existence of hundreds of "Rule 9" duplicate ballots shot down, there’s not much Norm can do to alter the existing ballot universe at all, much less shove it around enough to give him a win.  (They must realize this too, because they’re really amping up the "do-over" talk when they know full well it ain’t gonna happen.)

Suddenly, that Motion to Dismiss that Team Franken filed — predicated on the claim (based in part on Bell v. Gannaway) that there’s no way Coleman can find enough countable ballots to overtake Franken’s lead — is looking a lot stronger.   As Kossack seesdifferent points out, Norm’s people had been planning on perhaps 700 countable ballots to come out of Coleman’s 3a pile.    Instead, he got less than ninety.    The Election Contest Court might still deny this motion, just to deny Coleman the chance to holler "we wuz robbed!" (which they’re yelling anyway), but the factual basis of Coleman’s case is turning out to be gossamer and moonbeams and horsepucky.

Hang tight, folks:  This is all over bar the shoutin’, and the shoutin’ may be over even sooner than I’d hoped.