Norm Coleman
gregladen | January 6, 2009The Wall Street Journal published an editorial yesterday called "Funny Business in Minnesota" which is so full of inaccurate innuendo and fallacious factoids that when I read it I thought I was reading a piece of junk mail from Ann Coulter.
Well, the honorable web site Five Thirty Eight has torn the WSJ a new one with a brutally accurate deconstruction of the editorial. There really is virtually nothing in this editorial that can be salvaged from the bright light of actual truth. Shame on the Wall Street Journal.
Read the commentary from Five Thirty Eight here.
Thanks Mike for the tip.
gregladen | January 6, 2009Details are just coming in now.
LIVEBLOGGED
They are suing regarding: the missing ballots from Minneapoilis (that won't go anywhere, already settled); Double counting (that issue was killed off already, it will go no where) and absentee ballots (they have a small chance that this may develop into something).
They state that they will win in state court but have federal level issues to argue as well.
The won't and the don't. But it looks like they will continue to press.
We are being told that several Coleman lawyers are not being dispersed around the state to depose, under oath,…
gregladen | January 5, 2009As many of you have already heard, the recount process in Minnesota to determine the outcome of the Senatorial race is over, and Al Franken has been certified as winner.
There is now a review period of seven days during which any voter in the state of Minnesota. Including me, Al Franken, whomever, can sue for an Election Challenge. Although both Secretary of State Ritchie and I have expressed the opinion that Norm Coleman, who lost the race, is unlikely to issue such a challenge, the press and even Coleman's lawyers have suggested that a challenge will in fact be filed by three o'clock…
gregladen | January 4, 2009... regarding the likely response by Coleman following the certification of the Minnesota Senatorial Race tomorrow (Monday) by the Canvassing Board.
No matter who wins, either party can lodge a legal challenge, potentially pushing the election results out quite a period of time from now. In 1969, Minnesota was unable to certify their Senator until well in to March.
But this isn't the 1960s, and Norm Coleman surely knows that.
Just because he challenges the election, which is something he's well poised himself to do, it doesn't mean the outcome will change. If he fights tooth and nail to…
gregladen | January 3, 2009And the worst case scenario is that this lead could drop by far less then necessary to turn the race around.
Everyone assumes that the loser, in this case Coleman, will file a law suit. It would fit with how the game has been played so far. But what would such a law suit do? It is not the case that there is some 300 votes laying around that Coleman could have if he won a suit. The best he could probably do, and this is very unlikely, is to get about 130 votes that may or may not have been double counted thrown out. Not enough.
The other thing Coleman could do with a law suit is to…
gregladen | January 2, 2009I live in Minnesota, and our team is the Vikings. So I know something about losing, and from this perspective, I can explain to you what Norm Coleman is doing.
First, the context. Tomorrow, Saturday, the canvassing board will open and count absentee ballots and add that to the mix. As I demonstrated to you mathematically it is highly unlikely that this will change the current situation, in which Al Franken is ahead. To be more exact, the Worst Case Scenario estimate that I made predicts that with 650 or so ballots to open, there is a better than 75% chance that the count will not change…
gregladen | January 1, 2009The current situation is this: We are waiting for a final decision next week on the outcome of the race, and most likely this outcome will start numerically with Franken's current 49 vote lead and be adjusted by the addition of several hundred absentee ballots. The exact number of these ballots to consider is still being fought out.
Following the board's decision next week, probably Wednesday, one of the candidates will be declared the winner (this is the job of the canvassing board .... to declare the winner) and sent to Washington. There may well be further court fights over this, but…
gregladen | December 30, 2008The next few days will be the most interesting, potentially, in the Franken Coleman recount.
Notice that I do not use any words like "Debacle, Fiasco, Circus, Swampmire" and so on when speaking of the recount. This is because this is a democratic (as in America! The Greatest Democracy in the World Love it or Leave It" and all that democratic) process and I am a patriot and I refuse to malign our great nation and its constitutional government. The simple truth is that an election is a kind of adversarial process and when a recount is mandated by the processes, the adversarial parts keep…
gregladen | December 23, 2008Most of the work related to the ongoing recount in the Minnesota Senate race ended week when the canvassing board went through almost all of the challenged ballots, assigning them to either Franken, Coleman, or "other." Many ballot challenges issued earlier by one campaign or the other were withdrawn but for clerical reasons could not be considered yet. In this way, the week ended with Franken ahead by over 250 votes.
The challenged-then-withdrawn ballots have been re-entered into the count unofficially, and the canvassing board will verify those data today and adjust the count…
gregladen | December 21, 2008"Yesterday the voters spoke. We prevailed," ... [my opponent could opt to waive the recount.]
"It's up to him whether such a step is worth the tax dollars it will take to conduct," He said, telling reporters he would "step back" if he were in [his opponent's] position...
Oh. No, wait, sorry. I got that backwards. The above quote was Norm Coleman telling us that Al Franken should bow out of the senate race back when Coleman was ahead by between 200 and 300 points, and prior to the legally mandated recount. Now that the recount is virtually over and it is Franken ahead by between 200 and 300…
gregladen | December 21, 2008"Yesterday the voters spoke. We prevailed," ... [my opponent could opt to waive the recount.]
"It's up to him whether such a step is worth the tax dollars it will take to conduct," He said, telling reporters he would "step back" if he were in [his opponent's] position...
Oh. No, wait, sorry. I got that backwards. The above quote was Norm Coleman telling us that Al Franken should bow out of the senate race back when Coleman was ahead by between 200 and 300 points, and prior to the legally mandated recount. Now that the recount is virtually over and it is Franken ahead by between 200 and 300…
gregladen | December 21, 2008"Yesterday the voters spoke. We prevailed," ... [my opponent could opt to waive the recount.]
"It's up to him whether such a step is worth the tax dollars it will take to conduct," He said, telling reporters he would "step back" if he were in [his opponent's] position...
Oh. No, wait, sorry. I got that backwards. The above quote was Norm Coleman telling us that Al Franken should bow out of the senate race back when Coleman was ahead by between 200 and 300 points, and prior to the legally mandated recount. Now that the recount is virtually over and it is Franken ahead by between 200 and 300…
gregladen | December 19, 2008Update: Franken is ahead by 249 votes !!!
UPDATE: DONE with the Franken re-entered (some withdrawn) ... now looking at some ballots that were set aside earlier.
UPDATE: ... bam... the canvassing board just threw out consideration of all the duplicate ballots except seven that have some reasonable 'on the face' cases.
UPDATE: The small number of duplicate issue but addressable "on the face" is done.
UPDATE: They are now going through miscellaneous challenges, of which I don't think there are too many. I think for various reasons that this is going to be mainly reductions in Franken's…
gregladen | December 18, 2008Right now, the best estimate for the difference between Franken and Coleman in the Minnesota Senate Race Recount is between about two and five votes (Coleman leading). The challenges that are currently underway and that will be finished tomorrow come hell or high water will shift that mainly towards Franken. It is quite likely that Franken will be ahead at the end of the day based on challenged ballots.
However, another important part of this recount is the consideration of absentee ballots that seem to have been improperly rejected. Team Franken wants them looked at because Al Franken is…
gregladen | December 18, 2008Donors to Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman's reelection campaign may be surprised to learn that [he] is planning to use their contributions to pay blue-chip criminal defense lawyers to defend him against a reported FBI probe into his dealings with a wealthy businessman.
... Coleman and his wife, Laurie, have retained lawyers ... to deal with allegations that his friend and political patron Nasser Kazeminy funneled $80,000 to the senator's wife through a Kazeminy-controlled Texas oil services company. The Colemans have denied the charges -- and accused rival Al Franken of stoking the controversy.
"…
gregladen | December 17, 2008Think back to Florida eight years ago. There is a reasonable argument that Al Gore was duly voted, even via the electoral college, to be President of the United States, but George W. Bush was placed in that office for one and only one reason: The recount process in Florida was transformed into a circus, and the mainstream press in the United States whipped large parts of the populous and many involved in the process into a panic. The delay in determining the winner was going to damage democracy. The free world could not survive any more waiting. It did not matter that the guy running…
gregladen | December 17, 2008Moments ago, the Minnesota State Canvassing Board has completed the review of several hundred challenges produced during the process of recounting the November 5th ballots in the US Senate race between Norm Coleman and Al Franken. The next stage will be to review the Coleman challenges, of which there are approximately double the number as Franken challenges. While it is possible that the Canvassing board will begin looking at Coleman challenges today, word has it that they are going to knock off a half hour early after a brief discussion of some other issues. The original plan to finish…
gregladen | December 16, 2008)Updated) According to several different sources of information, it appears that when the challenged ballots are figured into the current Minnesota Senate Seat Recount, Candidate Al Franken will move ahead of incumbent Senator Norm Coleman by somewhere between eight and twelve votes. This is significantly different than I had expected. I had predicted that Franken would move ahead by one vote because, well, that would be really funny.
Both sides of the race have withdrawn the vast majority of challenged ballots. Secretary of state Ritchie delayed the start of the canvassing board's meeting…
gregladen | December 13, 2008But he's going down fighting.
First, the going down part:
This concerns Paul McKim, who is the former CEO of a Houston company, Deep Marine Technologies Inc.. He has filed a lawsuit in district court in Harris County, Texas that alleges that a majority shareholder, Minneapolis based Nasser Kazeminy, used corporate funds to help Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman.
Accoring to the suit, Kazeminy...
...directed $75,000 to an insurance company that contracted with Coleman's wife, Laurie Coleman, under the guise that the payments were for services.
McKim also alleges that Kazeminy and another co…
gregladen | December 12, 2008 ... because it is hard to be a Senator from Prison. The latest from Fox News:
The FBI is reportedly investigating allegations that a Minnesota businessman tried to funnel $75,000 in campaign contributions to Sen. Norm Coleman through the senator's wife, Laurie, at the same time Coleman was going into debt because of extensive home renovations.
According to a report from MyFOXTwinCities.com, two lawsuits allege that in the spring of 2007, Nasser Kazeminy began making $25,000 payments from Deep Marine Technology, a Texas company he controls, to Laurie Coleman's employer, insurer Hayes…