Legal News

With Lawsuit, Coleman Halts Funnyman?s Apparent Victory in Minnesota

By Dan Slater

Republican Norm Coleman and his wife, Jan. 6, 2009. (AP/Dawn VIllella)

Will Funnyman Al Franken be Minnesota’s next Senator? Not until the legal challenges are sorted out.

Republican Norm Coleman said Tuesday he is suing to challenge Franken’s apparent recount victory in Minnesota’s U.S. Senate race, delaying a resolution of the contest for weeks or months. Here are reports from the AP and the StarTribune.

At a news conference, Coleman reportedly said he won’t accept a board’s determination that Franken won 225 more votes in the November election. “We are filing this contest to make absolutely sure every valid vote was counted and no one’s was counted more than anyone else’s,” he said.

“Democracy is not a machine,” he said. “Sometimes it’s messy and inconvenient, and reaching the best conclusion is never quick because speed is not the first objective, fairness is.”

The suit alleges that hundreds of rejected absentee ballots from Republican-leaning areas should have been part of the recount, that some ballots in Democratic territory were counted twice and that election officials were wrong to use machine tallies for a Minneapolis precinct where ballots went missing. The suit also reportedly alleges that the Canvassing Board made mistakes when determining voter intent on challenged ballots, that ineligible voters cast ballots and that some absentee ballots were erroneously opened early, raising chain-of-custody concerns.

Senate-designate Michael Bennet speaks during a news conference to announce his selection. (AP/David Zalubowski)

The case would fall to a three-judge panel selected by Chief Justice Eric Magnuson of the state Supreme Court, an appointee of Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty and a member of the Canvassing Board. The costs of the suit, notes the AP, falls to the losing campaign, although state law could require various units of government to foot the bill if their errors or irregularities lead to a reversal.

In other Senate appointment news, Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter (U. of Colorado Law), a former deputy district attorney in Denver, shocked his state late last week when he tapped 44 year-old Michael Bennet, the superintendent of Denver’s troubled public school system, to fill the Senate seat that will be vacated by Ken Salazar, who’s been nominated as interior secretary in the Obama administration. Bennet (Yale Law) is a lifelong Democrat who first made his mark in Denver as a corporate-turnaround specialist for Republican Philip Anschutz, a billionaire patron of conservative causes. Here’s the WSJ story.

Bennet has never run for public office. But, then again, he had no education experience when he won the superintendent’s job either.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on January 07, 2009 (boomark / email).