The U.S. Supreme Court stunned the nation today with a 5-4 decision holding that Al Franken -- until recently the Obama administration's ambassador to the Vatican -- was the official winner of the 2008 Minnesota Senate contest.
The court held that lower courts had erred by refusing to count three decisive absentee ballots for Franken found two years ago jammed in the filter of a Brooklyn Park woman's vacuum cleaner. "Every vote must count," proclaimed Chief Justice Al Gore, who read his 936-page decision from the bench.
The court's decision closes an epic seven-year struggle filled with legal twists and turns unparalleled in our nation's history.
Coleman appeared to hold a decided advantage in the contest after he won the actual vote count in 2008. But as the dispute dragged on, the events following Election Day proved largely irrelevant -- minor skirmishes leading up to the legal, political and public relations battle that was to follow.
After the seventh recount of the vote was completed in September 2009 -- settling nothing since both candidates challenged every vote cast -- Franken filed simultaneous legal proceedings in state and federal courts, before the European Commission of Human Rights and with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
In 2010, Coleman suffered a setback when the Supreme Court issued its first decision on the contest. In what became known as the "Franken's Fools" decision, the court held that even those absentee ballots that voters forgot to mail must be counted.
No forgotten ballots were ever recovered, but Franken's crack legal team assembled a group of Harvard psychologists who submitted expert testimony at trial establishing that the average Franken voter was twice as likely as the average Coleman voter to be chronically forgetful about life's basic tasks. Statisticians extrapolated on this disparity to convince the court that Franken had been unfairly deprived of 147 votes.
In 2011, Coleman staged a comeback with his 23 "Every Coleman Vote Counts" booths at the Minnesota State Fair. The venture's success proved short-lived, however, when a team of U.N. election observers -- composed of Zimbabwean and Iranian monitors and led by former President Jimmy Carter -- investigated reports that Coleman operatives were offering a pound of cheese curds for each Coleman absentee ballot found.
