Early last year, Hennepin County Judge Denise Reilly couldn't "even really say I knew what an election contest was."

But she soon learned. She was one of the three district judges that handled the 2009 election case that determined Democrat Al Franken won the 2008 Senate race, besting Republican Sen. Norm Coleman by 312 votes.

Reilly, along with Supreme Court Chief Justice Eric Magnuson (who sat on the recount canvassing board), Supreme Court Associate Justice Helen M. Meyer (which made the final decision in the case), Hennepin County elections manager Rachel Smith (who was with Anoka county during the recount) and book author Jay Weiner shared their recollections of the long, crazy recount, contest and eventual end of the 2008 Senate race at William Mitchell College of Law Wednesday night.

The event attracted many who lived through it, including Franken attorney David Lillehaug, several officials from the secretary of state's office and election experts (as well as a smattering of reporters who covered the recount and trial ballot to ballot but went to the Mitchell event for fun.)

Magnuson brought props to the Mitchell panel, including a "Don't Blame Me I voted for Lizard People" bumper sticker a former colleague made up for him. (One of the most famous ballots the canvassing board judged had "lizard people" scribbled on it. It was considered an overvote and did not count.)

He also brought his much-acclaimed "hieroglyphic sheet" on which he kept a record of the precedents the canvassing board set as they judged challenged ballots – whether an X over an oval counted or a scribbled initial spoiled a ballot, etc. He had the sheet framed and under glass and offered to let people have their photo taken with it afterwards. Many attendees took him up on the offer.

Here, for those at home and published perhaps for the first time, is a pdf of that all important sheet.

Here's an image:

Some other details from Reilly: When Supreme Court Justice Alan Page first asked Reilly to be on the three judge panel to handle the election contest, she said: "I think I stammered."

Usually before a significant case comes to trial, a judge has "lived and breathed that case" for at least a year. In the election contest, "we knew nothing going into this case." She said at times it seemed from the outside and the inside that they were "fumbling around."

She had very little acquaintance with her fellow judges -- when she first saw Pennington County Judge Kurt Marben, "I thought he was the Ramsey County Clerk." By the end of the trial, she said, she realized, "I could not ask for better team mates."

"To say that we worked hard would be understatement," she said. By close of trial, the case had amassed 21 feet of documents when laid end to end, she said. The orders that they wrote from January to April filled a nearly half-foot wide loose-leaf notebook.

She said the panel devised many methods to determine who would preside over each day's business to keep them from any detectable pattern. "Initially, we all wanted to be the presiding judge and sometimes we would do rock, paper, scissors…by the end of the trial, if we were doing rock, paper, scissors, if you won then you got to designate someone else to be the presiding judge the next day."

There were trial days as boring as watching paint dry, she said. The entire panel adopted the advice Judge Elizabeth Hayden got from a nun as a child in Catholic school: When you are impatient, "'make Christmas trees with your hands and put them on your desk." There were times when all three jurists' hands were placed into triangles on their desks to ward away the impatience.

She said she learned that attorneys from Washington, DC, Seattle and Minneapolis watched the trial live on the Internet and would send the lawyers in the courtroom strategy notes in real time.

All of the three judge panel's decisions and orders were unanimous, which Reilly said was "really important." So they worked through any differences they had until they could come to concurrence.


Last, Reilly noted that someone created a Peeps diorama of the three judge panel and the Senate trial. But in the peeps contest, Reilly said, "We came in second...I think they didn't count the absentee ballots."

Some insights from Justice Meyers:

The Supreme Court jointly picked the three judge panel members and it was one of the most important things the Supreme Court did in the entire process, she said. "It was a deliberative process," she said.

They wanted seasoned judges because "they would be facing probably toughest trial that any judge in Minnesota had ever faced in terms of public scrutiny and the skill of the lawyers." They wanted judges who were geographically diverse and not all appointed by one governor, she said. They ended up picking a panel appointed by governors of three different parties, blunting accusations of partisanship in their decision making.

She said the 71-day Supreme Court process for Coleman's appeal of Franken's 312 vote win – from briefs to decision – was the fast track for the court. She compared the way the court normally moves to a barge on the Mississippi, "it is not a little speedboat…because if it runs into the bank, it can do a lot of damage." But, given that a senate seat was hanging in the balance, they sped up their barge. "From the inside it felt very fast, from the outside I think it probably looked very slow," she said.

Writing the actual decision that confirmed Franken's win was a laborious, strange and speedy process for the court. She said: "It was an opinion that was written by everyone on the court." (Save the two justices – Magnuson and G. Barry Anderson – who served on the canvassing board that handled the recount and thus recued themselves.) "We all worked on the editing process together," she said. It was tough. "When we were done with that, we were happy to not see each other for about a week."


You can view the entire event, as you could almost all of the recount and trial, courtesy of the Uptake, which Weiner aptly dubbed the "psychedelic C-SPAN." Here's the fascinating recount of the recount:

theuptake on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free