090111: Coleman Will Challenge Franken's "Election" in Minnesota

Democrat Al Franken was officially declared the winner in Minnesota's Senate race, defeating Republican Sen. Norm Coleman by 225 votes, according to the state Canvassing Board.

"Al Franken has won the election," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) declared to a group of reporters in the Senate hallway. "Everything is over with. ... The race in Minnesota is over."

But immediately after the Canvassing Board announced Franken had won, the Coleman campaign issued a statement that it will contest the results, thus preventing Franken from being certified as the winner, a key designation that could affect whether there is a dramatic Senate floor fight to seat him.

And Senate Republican leaders warned that any attempt to seat Franken before he is officially certified will meet with significant resistance.

Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, the incoming chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has threatened a filibuster if Democrats attempt to seat Franken before Coleman concedes.

"If Sen. Reid seeks to seat Al Franken without a certificate of election, he will be telling the people of Minnesota, and all Americans for that matter, that rules and laws can be ignored whenever he sees fit or whenever it's politically convenient for Senate Democrats," Cornyn said in a statement Monday. "This would send a terrible signal to all Americans who are rightfully expecting this new Congress to work together in a bipartisan manner."

"The race in Minnesota is not over," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R- Ky.) said. "It's well-established in the Senate: The way you get sworn in and the way you get seated is to show up with an election certificate. And that is determined under Minnesota law."

Reid offered his toughest language yet on the outcome. "Coleman will never ever serve in the Senate [again]," he said. "He lost the election. He can stall things, but he'll never serve in the Senate."

But when asked if Franken would be sworn in on Tuesday, Reid said, "No."

Franken declared victory in front of his Minneapolis home late Monday afternoon. "After 62 days, after the careful and painstaking hand inspection of nearly 3 million ballots, after hours and hours of hard work by elections officials and volunteers across the state, I am proud and humbled to stand before you as the next senator from Minnesota," he said.

The Coleman campaign, however, signaled that, in its view, the election was nowhere close to being over. "This process isn't at the end. It is now just at the beginning," Coleman counsel Tony Trimble said in a statement. "We will contest the results of the Canvassing Board — otherwise, literally millions of Minnesotans will be disenfranchised."

That post-election challenge will be handled by a three-judge panel appointed by the state's chief justice.

Coleman's strategy is the political equivalent of the Hail Mary pass: The first-term senator's challenge is predicated on three key points and would have to prevail on all of them to have a chance at winning.

Coleman's campaign argues that 133 ballots that went missing from a heavily Democratic precinct should be excluded from the recount total. The decision to include those ballots — which disappeared after being counted on Election Day — netted Franken 49 votes.

Coleman's team also claims that about 150 ballots were double-counted in Franken's favor during the recount process.

Another point of contention is the 650 rejected absentee ballots from Republican areas that are expected to have gone for Coleman. The state Supreme Court ruled Monday that arguments over counting those ballots would have to be taken up in a post-election challenge.

Coleman's "had almost no good news since Election Night. He needs a dramatic reversal of fortune," said Steve Schier, a political science professor at Minnesota's Carleton College. "Everything's gone wrong for Coleman; every decision has gone against Coleman. What he needs is a lot of this to be overturned in a challenge process by the courts."

Franken netted even more votes than expected when the final batch of more than 900 absentee ballots were counted Saturday, expanding his 47-vote lead to 225 votes.

That development and Monday's court ruling emboldened the Democratic Senate leadership and the Franken campaign, which is confident that any challenge will not change the outcome. "We were up by 40 and change last week. That could've been snatched away from us at any moment," said Franken campaign spokeswoman Jess McIntosh. "Two-hundred twenty-five is a much bigger lead."

The months-long recount process has been a slow bleed for Coleman, who led Franken by more than 700 votes on Election Night but saw his lead evaporate as election officials across the state hand-counted all 2.9 million ballots.

Even as the recount was wrapping up, Coleman campaign officials privately expected to hold a slim lead after the disputed ballots were tallied. In a sign of optimism, the campaign filed a lawsuit attempting to prevent any additional absentee ballots from being included in the final count — under the assumption that it would be protecting a lead.

But when Franken emerged with a thin double-digit lead, Coleman's campaign had to rethink its options. In the recount's final week the campaign found itself trying to count additional rejected absentee ballots that it once insisted should not be included.

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