Election Law
Top Minn. Court Says Franken Won Senate Race; Coleman Concedes
Posted Jun 30, 2009 2:14 PM CST
By Martha Neil
Democrat Al Franken edged out his Republican opponent in a hard-fought election for a U.S. Senate seat by 312 votes, the Minnesota Supreme Court decided today in a unanimous ruling expected to give the Democratic party a solid 60-seat majority.
After the court's decision, incumbent Norm Coleman conceded the race, reports the Associated Press.
Initially, Coleman was reported to have a razor-thin lead when the ballots in the November 2008 election were first tallied, recounts Reuters. A total of about 2.4 million votes were cast.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty has said he will certify the candidate found by the court to be the election winner.
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Comments
J.D.
Jun 30, 2009 2:36 PM CST
“Initially, Coleman was reported to have a razor-thin lead when the ballots in the November 2008 election were first tallied…”
...then, after liberal ‘re-counters’ got their hands on the ballots, Franken magically came out hundreds of votes in the lead!
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T.R.
Jun 30, 2009 2:37 PM CST
...which Coleman failed to prove at trial. If you have any evidence to that effect, J.D., I’m sure Coleman could have used your help.
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Tim
Jun 30, 2009 2:41 PM CST
Now there is no excuse for Obama and the liberal left not to turn America into the PROMISED LAND. The GOP can’t stop them at all.
If everyone doesn’t have a high paying job, the debt paid down, free health care, colledge education, etc by 2010 we will know that the socalisim and marxisim that Obama represents will have failed.
It’s now 2010 or failure for Obama and the socalist left.
Everything from today going forward is 100% Obama because he ram down any program he wants.
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J.D.
Jun 30, 2009 3:23 PM CST
TR, ha, ha, you made me laugh. Do you think evidence plays any role when libs get judges to overturn elections? Ha, ha, ha…
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T.R.
Jun 30, 2009 3:43 PM CST
@J.D.
Ahh…the classic talk-radio technique when countered: Laugh loudly, pound on the table, cut to commercial. When back on air, move on to something else as if nothing happened.
Besides, if these “libs” you mention have so fully co-opted the American legal system, then surely you can provide some documentation to that effect, right? Otherwise, you’re concluding from the faked-moon-landing, Area-51 realm of discourse, and no one will ever take you seriously, dude.
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Useless JD Comments
Jun 30, 2009 4:38 PM CST
Yeah JD, these “libs” stole the election just like Jeb Bush helped his brother to win the 2000 election by “magically” appeared ballots at recount.
This is call Karma. In case your tiny brain does not know what it is…
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B. McLeod
Jul 1, 2009 12:13 AM CST
Oh yeah! That Karma ran over his dogma.
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associate
Jul 1, 2009 1:54 PM CST
Please have a look at the ACTUAL ballots and the way in which they were counted:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,470892,00.html
I don’t think that there’s any doubt here that the election was not fair. I’d not say stolen, because Franken may have legitmately won, but we’ll never know since different rules were applied to different ballots when counting them.
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J.D.
Jul 1, 2009 4:24 PM CST
Liberals are so silly. Let’s remember WHO was the FIRST ONE to bring the 2000 election into the courts:
AL GORE.
That’s right, a liberal—discovering he was losing the election—ran to the courts with the hope that people in black robes would dismiss the electorate and anoint him.
The libs didn’t get away with it in 2000, but they seem to have done so here.
And thanks for posting that link, Associate. It’s pretty shocking, but those who are willfully ignorant won’t read it.
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J.D.
Jul 7, 2009 8:39 AM CST
Mr. Coleman didn’t lose the election. He lost the fight to stop the state canvassing board from changing the vote-counting rules after the fact.
Mr. Franken trailed Mr. Coleman by 725 votes after the initial count on election night, and 215 after the first canvass. The Democrat’s strategy from the start was to manipulate the recount in a way that would discover votes that could add to his total. The Franken legal team swarmed the recount, aggressively demanding that votes that had been disqualified be added to his count, while others be denied for Mr. Coleman.
But the team’s real goldmine were absentee ballots, thousands of which the Franken team claimed had been mistakenly rejected. While Mr. Coleman’s lawyers demanded a uniform standard for how counties should re-evaluate these rejected ballots, the Franken team ginned up an additional 1,350 absentees from Franken-leaning counties. By the time this treasure hunt ended, Mr. Franken was 312 votes up, and Mr. Coleman was left to file legal briefs.
What Mr. Franken understood was that courts would later be loathe to overrule decisions made by the canvassing board, however arbitrary those decisions were. He was right. The three-judge panel overseeing the Coleman legal challenge, and the Supreme Court that reviewed the panel’s findings, in essence found that Mr. Coleman hadn’t demonstrated a willful or malicious attempt on behalf of officials to deny him the election. And so they refused to reopen what had become a forbidding tangle of irregularities.
This is now the second time Republicans have been beaten in this kind of legal street fight. In 2004, Dino Rossi was ahead in the election-night count for Washington Governor against Democrat Christine Gregoire. Ms. Gregoire’s team demanded the right to rifle through a list of provisional votes that hadn’t been counted, setting off a hunt for “new” Gregoire votes. By the third recount, she’d discovered enough to win. This was the model for the Franken team.
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