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Local recount directors at wits end with ballot challengers
If you walked into the basement of the Dakota County Judicial Center Monday you could sense a definite tension in the air. It took only a matter of seconds to pick up on a definite vibe, that a tough and tedious job had become more so and for the wrong reasons. "Nearer the finish it becomes more intense," Dakota County Auditor Joel Beckman told KARE, "I think the campaigns believe they have to find something they can challenge." Beckman noted that on the first day of the recount he fielded only 17 challenges, out of nearly 35,000 ballots recounted in the extremely tight US Senate race between Republican incumbent Norm Coleman and Democratic challenger Al Franken. But on Monday in one Eagan precinct alone, there were more than 50 challenges among the 1,800 ballots. At that point Beckman could be seen going over the stack of challenges with observers from the Franken and Coleman campaigns and asking them to, in essence, get real. "I have people here, hard working volunteers that are at the point of just walking out because they're so fed up with this," Beckman could be heard saying from his side of the yellow tape. "They were asking that ballots be invalidated due to very small pen rests, small stray marks," Beckman explained later. "My intent is that we actually not try to inundate the state canvassing board with things that they absolutely are not going to undertake as a challenge." Beckman said it had been a learning experience for everyone involved, including the voters who mark up their ballots in such a way that they become defective or at least disputed. "I just hope I never have to go through this again," a clearly exhausted Beckman told KARE. Campaigns weigh in Both senate campaigns have expressed interest in going back over the list of challenged ballots before the State Canvassing Board begins to look at them in December. The Coleman campaign attorney conceded there may be a few "rogue recounters" on his side of the fence, who are questioning too many ballots out of exuberance, but he denied there's such a directive from the top. At the same time, Fritz Knaak, accused the Franken campaign of making excessive challenges part of the game plan in order to make the race seem closer than it actually is. The most recent official count put the margin at 180, out of 2.9 million votes cast on November 4th. "We're seeing a large number of -- frivolous is a loaded word -- let's just say valueless, efforts," Knaak told reporters. The people on the Franken team have said many times that there is no campaign strategy to launch unwarranted challenges, and they feel good about the margin at this point. The Franken campaign shifted its focus Monday to the issue of apparently missing ballots, to places where the number of ballots scanned by the machines is higher than the number that made it to the recount tables. "Missing ballot are not automatically an indicator of foul play," Franken's recount attorney Marc Elias remarked, "But they should be a serious matter and cause for concern." The campaign gave several examples, including Oak Park Heights Precinct 2 in Washington County, where the machines recorded a total of 1,462 ballots on Election Day. Only 1,449 were in the stack to be hand recounted, according to the recount totals reported to the Secretary of State's office last week. Elias said the Franken campaign is calling on Secretary of State Mark Ritchie to instruct all local election officials to check the boxes their ballots were kept in after being scanned on election day.
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