Franken wins senate seat recount but Coleman to sue

ST. PAUL, Minn.—A Minnesota board yesterday certified results showing Democrat Al Franken winning the state’s U.S. Senate recount over Republican Norm Coleman, whose lawyer promised a legal challenge that probably will keep the race in limbo for months.
The Canvassing Board’s declaration started a seven-day clock for Coleman, the incumbent, to file a lawsuit protesting the result.

His attorney, Tony Trimble, said the challenge will be filed within 24 hours. The challenge will keep Franken from getting the election certificate he needs to take the seat in Washington.
“This process isn’t at an end,” Trimble said. “It is now just at the beginning.”
Franken, a former “Saturday Night Live” personality, ended the recount up by 225 votes—an astonishingly thin margin in a race where more than 2.9 million votes were cast.
“After 62 days of careful and painstaking hand-inspection of nearly three million ballots, after hours and hours of hard work by election officials and volunteers around the state, I am proud to stand before you as the next senator from Minnesota,” Franken said yesterday in brief remarks to reporters outside his downtown Minneapolis condominium.
Coleman’s campaign said he would make an appearance today in Minnesota. He was in Washington yesterday.
The recount reversed the unofficial Election Day results, which showed Coleman with a 215-vote lead.
Franken made up the deficit over seven tortuous weeks of ballot-sifting in part by prevailing on challenges that both campaigns brought to thousands of ballots. He also did better than Coleman when election officials opened and counted more than 900 absentee ballots that erroneously had been disqualified on Election Day.
Coleman’s lawyers have argued some ballots were mishandled and others were wrongly excluded from the recount, giving Franken an unfair advantage.
The final blow came earlier yesterday when the Minnesota Supreme Court denied Coleman’s petition to add hundreds more disqualified absentee ballots from Republican-leaning areas to the count.
Secretary of State Mark Ritchie was careful to note yesterday that the board simply was signing off on the numbers found by the recount: Franken, with 1,212,431 votes, and Coleman, with 1,212,206 votes.
“We’re not doing anything today that declares winners or losers or anything to that effect,” Ritchie stressed.
All five members of the canvassing board—Ritchie, plus two state Supreme Court justices and two Ramsey County judges—voted to accept the recount results.
A lawsuit would extend the fight over the seat for months. Any court case would open doors closed to the campaigns during the administrative recount. They would be able to access voter rolls, inspect machines, and get testimony from election workers.
The case would fall to a three-judge panel picked by Chief Justice Eric Magnuson of the Supreme Court. Magnuson served on the Canvassing Board, but declined to say yesterday if he would remove himself from the selection process as a result.
Magnuson was an appointee of Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty.