Franken Gets More Good News

On a day when Senate hopeful Al Franken had already received two bits of good news, the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported on another piece of really great news:

"Franken received unexpected good news when Deputy Secretary of State Jim Gelbmann dropped a mini-bombshell [at the state canvassing board meeting], telling the board that in overwhelmingly Democratic Duluth — which has not officially tallied rejected absentees — about 40 percent of that city's 319 rejected absentee ballots were mistakenly rejected. Gelbmann said the city rejected the votes because either the voter or the witness did not date their signatures. He said he couldn't find any state law to support such a rejection."

It has not been a good 24 hours for Norm Coleman, and so his campaign is going to go to court to try and stop the count, but they face long odds because there already are standards set forth in Minnesota election law for rejecting a ballot and the Franken campaign is rightly arguing that these standards should be used and that the rejected ballots that do not meet those four standards should be counted.