Ramsey County elections chief Joe Mansky
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Senate trial puts routine election work under microscope
Monday was Groundhog Day for most people, but for Ramsey County elections chief Joe Mansky it may have seemed more like the Bill Murray movie of the same name. In the film Groundhog Day the main character is forced to live the same day over and over again. Mansky found himself Monday in the exact same place he was for a good part of the previous week: on a witness stand in Saint Paul answering questions about the Election Day 2008, which also refuses to end when it comes to the fight for Minnesota's second seat in the United States Senate. As the election contest trial in Minnesota's disputed senate race entered its second week, attorneys for Democrat Al Franken looked to poke holes in Republican former senator Norm Coleman's "double counting" case. The Coleman camp's theory is that unmarked duplicate ballots found their way to the recount tables in some precincts, and were counted along with their corresponding original ballots which led to double counting of votes. Mansky testified last week that would be a plausible explanation of why the total number of ballots that made the recount table for some precincts exceeded the number of voters who signed the voter rosters. On cross-examination Monday from Franken attorney Kevin Hamiliton, Mansky agreed there are other explanations for the numbers of voters not squaring up with the numbers of ballots. For instance some people voted without signing the roster, while some signed in but didn't stay to vote. Or in some cases absentee ballots were found after the ballot scanning machines had been shut down for the night and electronically locked. That was the scenario in Maplewood's sixth precinct, where 171 absentee ballots were set aside earlier on Election Day and then rediscovered after the ballot scanners had been shuttered. Mansky conceded that paperwork snafus and other human errors happen on a regular basis in the decades he has spent running elections on the state and local level. Election judges are citizens, after all, who work 14-hour days a fairly nominal wages according to Mansky. One such exchange between Hamilton and Mansky went as follows: Hamilton: Doesn't mean there was fraud? Mansky: Correct. Hamilton: Doesn't mean there was malfeasance? Mansky: Correct. Hamilton: Doesn't necessarily mean it was double counting? Mansky: Correct. Hamilton: Just means there were some tired citizen election judges who either forgot to write something down, or made some math errors at the end of a long day? Mansky: Yes. Coleman trailed Franken by 225 when the recount ended, and his best chance for closing the gap or overtaking Franken is to convince the court to revive thousands of rejected absentee ballots. Nearly 12,000 absentees were rejected for various reasons on of before Election Day, and only 933 of those rejects have been opened and counted. Those were selected in a process set up by a Minnesota Supreme Court ruling giving campaigns the power to veto absentees they felt were properly rejected. Monday Hamilton sought to further highlight the Coleman campaign's change of heart on the subject of those rejected ballots. He led Mansky on a tour of several ballots he felt were wrongfully rejected, but were bounced by the Coleman campaign during that judging process established by the high court. The fact Hamilton didn't touch on, but Coleman's attorneys pointed out, is that the Franken campaign actually blocked more of those ballots in Ramsey County than Coleman's people did. "We now know many ballots that were wrongly rejected because the voters weren't on the registration rolls when in fact they were," Coleman attorney Ben Ginsberg told reporters Monday, "Where this occurred in any county those votes should now be counted." In Pennsylvania Monday "Punxsutawney Phil" saw his shadow, and folklore has it the nation's in for another six weeks of winter weather in 2009. The question for reporters covering the election contest trial is whether they're looking at six more weeks of courtroom action, or whether a resolution is right around the corner.
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