Proofiness - Charles Seife [59]
As the trailing candidate, Franken and his team fought tirelessly, suing and pleading and filing papers to try to get those wrongly rejected ballots counted as soon as possible. After all, it’s crucial to count every vote. The five-person canvassing board was sympathetic to their argument; these were valid votes, after all. However, a quirk in legal language meant that the canvassing board was powerless to correct the error. (The board was only able to correct errors having to do with votes cast during the elections, and rejected absentee ballots hadn’t technically been cast.) Stretching its powers to the limit, the board requested that the counties voluntarily go through their rejected absentee ballots and pick out the ones that hadn’t been rejected for a valid reason.
As the leading candidate, Coleman and his team fought tirelessly, suing and pleading and filing papers to try to uphold the rule of law by keeping those ballots out of the recount. The team tried to get a restraining order to force the issue. Coleman’s obvious self-interest in blocking these absentee ballots from getting counted was beside the point. He was motivated by profound concern about the sanctity of our electoral process. Rules are rules, after all. The battle went through the court system, which issued a ruling in early January that led to some 933 extra absentee ballots being counted. But in the meantime, the landscape had shifted underneath everybody’s feet.
The preliminary skirmishes over absentee ballots took place in November and December, while the recount was still under way. At the end of the recount, the five-person canvassing board plowed through all the challenged ballots, upholding the valid ones and dismissing frivolous ones. The number jumped around, but as the canvassing board’s work drew to a close at the end of December, it stabilized as a nearly fifty-vote lead for Franken. For the first time, Coleman was the underdog, and Franken was the leader. And then when those 933 absentee ballots were counted, they wound up being overwhelmingly in favor of Franken. When the smoke cleared in early January, Franken was up by 225 votes.
All of a sudden, the candidates’ roles had reversed. Franken was in the lead; he now merely had to sit on the football and wait. Coleman, on the other hand—the smell of desperation lingered over his camp. There weren’t many paths left that could lead to a Coleman victory. The standard “count every vote” strategy wouldn’t work; since uncounted ballots, particularly absentee ballots, seemed to favor Franken, counting more of them would make matters worse. So Coleman contested the election and tried to add some 650 extra ballots to the count, ballots that he admitted, in his own court filings, “were cast in areas which favored Coleman.” In other words, he wanted to count only the ballots that were likely to be for him. It was electoral cherry-picking. However, even Coleman’s lawyers recognized that this wasn’t a winning strategy, so a few weeks later Coleman moved to plan B: trying to get thousands and thousands of other absentee ballots, including ones that were validly rejected, included in the count.
The trial went on for weeks, and it was the end of March before the outcome was clear. The court allowed an additional 400 ballots to be counted. Unfortunately for Coleman, these ballots, like the others, favored Franken and raised his lead to 312. Coleman’s contest of the election was denied; Franken was declared the winner.
This wasn’t the end of the saga. Coleman appealed the decision, and the Republican Party collectively crossed its fingers. If Franken managed to capture the seat, the Democrats would have sixty votes in the Senate, precisely the number they needed to break any filibuster