Franken-Coleman Recount, 11/27/08: In Which The UpTake, Nate Silver, and MNIndy Kick the TradMed’s Butt

The TradMed Stance on the Minnesota state canvassing board’s non-ruling ruling on the rejected absentee ballots is that it was A Serious, Perhaps Fatal Blow To Franken’s Campaign.

But, if you watched the coverage of the board meeting over at The UpTake, Minnesota’s groundbreaking citizen-journalism video site, you saw something completely different (see graphic of screenshot I took of The UpTake’s ever-changing front page).

Nate Silver, who follows The UpTake religiously, has this to add:

Minnesota’s Canvassing Board today unanimously rejected a request by the Al Franken campaign to mandate that absentee ballots initially rejected as invalid be reconsidered, essentially declaring that it does not have jurisdiction to do so. However, the Franken campaign has at least two mechanisms by which those votes may in fact be counted.

The first is that the Canvassing Board will reconvene next week to consider a proposal to have county officials sort through their absentee ballots to determine which absentee ballots appeared to have no valid reason for rejection — a so-called "fifth pile" of ballots, as there are four valid criteria in Minnesota for rejecting absentees. The Canvassing Board could then rule that ballots in the fifth pile be counted. The Franken campaign seems inclined to let this process play out for now; in the meantime, at least one county (Itasca) appears as though it may re-evaluate the rejected absentee ballots on its own, without awaiting instructions from the state.

The second mechanism would be to do the good, old-fashioned American thing and sue. It is quite likely that the Franken campaign will sue if the Canvassing Board does not mandate that the "fifth pile" ballots be counted; the reporters at The Uptake think such a lawsuit would have a fair chance of prevailing.

At least one local lawyer I know thinks that the members of the state canvassing board are being a bunch of chickenshits, and that they really do have the authority to render a decision on absentee ballots but are being cowed by the Coleman campaign into abdicating their responsibility. Comments by Minnesota’s Secretary of State, Mark Ritchie, as quoted in the Minnesota Independent, would seem to indicate that he agrees at least in part with this assessment — he urges the canvassing board not to set up a situation where the only recourse voters have is a very expensive one:

I don’t hear huge debate that this State Canvassing Board wants to take up the question of rejected absentee ballots. At the moment it’s a non-issue. I’m really curious about how people think — let’s say it’s a thousand, let’s say it’s 500 — improperly rejected absentee ballots should get handled. Is it the view of the State Canvassing Board that they should all go to court? And which court could handle that number? Is there another option that is more cost-effective for the citizens and less stressful for the state judicial system?

Ritchie went on to answer his own rhetorical question by stating that there are no options outside of the courtroom, should the canvassing board fail to find a spine — and that the prospect of hundreds of voters going to court to get their ballots counted would be a "crushing" burden on Minnesota’s court system. (English translation: Don’t go dumping this on the courts, canvassing board — or you will forever bear the blame if our courts melt down over this.)

UPDATE:  Add Jeff Rosenberg and the Twin Cities Daily Planet to the list of those who are kicking TradMed butt on this story.   He’s stopped listing the "official" vote totals as they are just an artifact of Coleman’s addition-by-fake-subtraction gambit.