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Editorial: Coleman's charges need court's answer

Courts should rule on disenfranchisement claim.

Last update: April 7, 2009 - 6:59 PM

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A QUICK REVIEW?

An appeal to the Minnesota Supreme Court need not mean months of further delay before a U.S. senator is seated, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie said Tuesday. He said he would anticipate expedited proceedings and a ruling days or weeks later, not months.

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If ever a scene illustrated how valuable each ballot is in Minnesota elections, it was the one that unfolded Tuesday morning in solemn Courtroom 300 of the state Judicial Center.

With painstaking care, 351 previously unopened ballot envelopes were examined, opened, unfolded, stacked, screened for disqualifying marks, then scrutinized by state elections director Gary Poser and two competing attorneys before being called for either Al Franken, Norm Coleman or "other."

The result: a widened lead of 312 votes for Franken, and a resolve to appeal to the Minnesota Supreme Court from Coleman.

The three judges who have heard Coleman's challenge to Franken's post-Canvassing Board lead have not yet issued their final ruling. But Coleman attorney Ben Ginsberg spoke of Tuesday's ballot-counting exercise as "in essence, inconsequential" in the larger scheme of this case, and the ruling, expected within days, as a mere milepost on a journey that he considers far from complete.

"There's a larger group of voters that should be enfranchised," he said. By the Coleman legal team's analysis, 1,350 to 4,800 additional rejected absentee ballots belong in the count, he said, since other absentee ballots believed to have deficiencies similar to theirs were accepted by local officials in some places on election night. "This court has show an unwillingness to look at the problems with [Minnesota's] system," Ginsberg said. "As a result, when you get an election this close, you can't tell who won."

Those are serious charges, especially in Minnesota. This is a state in which "every vote counts" is much more than a get-out-the-vote slogan. It's an essential article in democracy's civic compact.

What's more, Minnesota's dynamic politics make it prone to close elections. For that reason, its well-developed election laws specify in great detail how the winner of close contests is to be determined. Fair elections, competently administered, are a source of state pride.

Ginsberg's remarks serve to remind Minnesotans that more is at stake in the Coleman-Franken contest than which of them will fill a Senate seat through 2014. Minnesota's electoral system is on trial, too.

It's important to this state that the Senate contest be resolved in a way that fully answers the Coleman campaign's allegations. Minnesotans should know whether the courts agree with Coleman's indictment of their system or find it without merit. If the system is ruled to be unfair to absentee voters, or insufficient to the resolution of close elections, the judges who make that finding should point the way to remedies.

A desire for that kind of systemic "framework" review of Minnesota's electoral processes had Secretary of State Mark Ritchie -- a DFLer -- saying Tuesday that he is eager for the "closure" that he believes a Coleman appeal to the Supreme Court would bring. "The Supreme Court should have an opportunity to take those larger framework issues, and address them in a way that removes the cloud that eight weeks [of litigation] and $10 million in lawyering have produced," Ritchie said. Coleman appears intent on giving the high court that opportunity; if he does, we hope they seize it.

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