Minn. Senate Trial Hinges On Voter Errors

Peter DeMuth signed his initials on his absentee ballot application, and his full name on the ballot envelope.

In Minnesota, that was enough to get his vote thrown out.

Should such small errors be enough to exclude ballots from a Senate race in which Democrat Al Franken leads Republican Norm Coleman by barely 200 votes? Predictably, Franken says yes, and Coleman says no.

Late Friday, the trial judges excluded many of the error-plagued ballots Coleman hoped would be counted. But there are still as many as 3,500 rejected absentee ballots in play, including the one belonging to DeMuth.

The ruddy-faced North Dakota State student from the Minneapolis suburbs isn't accused of some type of voter fraud. He made a minor mistake, but it was a mistake. Should his vote count?

DeMuth's case is just one example of the dozens of decisions before the judges in Minnesota's U.S. Senate trial. With their decision Friday to limit the categories of rejected ballots they'll consider, the trial is expected to gain momentum after crawling through its first three weeks consumed mostly with extracting trivial details over large piles of specific ballots.

"I want my vote counted," DeMuth, who tried to vote for Republican Norm Coleman, said on the witness stand a few days ago.

Coleman is trying to overcome Democrat Al Franken's 225-vote lead, and his attorneys want the judges to take a liberal view of whether rejected ballots like the one belonging to DeMuth should be counted. They say thousands of voters like DeMuth were disqualified for harmless errors, and that thousands of other absentee voters who made identical mistakes weren't penalized because the rules were enforced differently from one county to the next.

"We're trying to get a consistency in how these ballots are looked at and how they're evaluated," Coleman attorney Joe Friedberg told the judges. "You're the panel. We want it to be your eyes."

Franken's attorneys have at times seemed almost apologetic in arguing to exclude ballots like the one cast by DeMuth. Their message: We may not like it, but it's the law.

"This is not about whether I like the laws of Minnesota when it comes to absentee ballots," Franken attorney Marc Elias said. "If the Minnesota Legislature wants to lower the barriers to absentee voting, that's something I would wholeheartedly endorse."

But the votes under dispute were cast under current absentee ballot standards, which Elias said are among the strictest in the country. Unlike most states, Minnesota law has regarded absentee voting not as an alternative to in-person voting but as an option only for voters who can't make it to the polls on Election Day.

To that end, Minnesota law assigns several legal requirements to absentee voters: they must sign a ballot application and the ballot envelope, and the signatures must match; their name and address on the envelope must match the voter rolls; they must be registered voters; and they can't go on to vote on Election Day. People who vote absentee are also required to sign their ballot in the presence of a witness who is also a registered Minnesota voter.

Franken's attorneys say it doesn't really matter if enforcement of the rules varied somewhat from county to county. "There is a standard," Elias said. "They may think it should be looser, but there is a standard that all the counties are told to adhere to."

DeMuth decided to vote absentee because voting on Election Day would have meant driving the 250 miles from Fargo to Plymouth, which is still his legal residence. He testified that he applied for his absentee ballot in early October by downloading a copy of the application on his computer, converting it to an image file and then marking his initials onto the application using his computer mouse.

He got his absentee ballot a few days later, which he filled in, then signed his full name to the envelope using a pen. The city clerk in Plymouth decided the two signatures didn't match, and rejected DeMuth's ballot.

DeMuth said he was never notified of the rejection, which is supposed to happen. He didn't find out until shortly before the Senate trial started, when the Coleman campaign started calling people from a list of rejected absentee voters and asking who they voted for.

A number of voters in similar circumstances have testified for Coleman during the Senate trial, most confessing to their mistakes but asking that their vote be counted anyway.

Kelton and Marcella Adams, a retired husband and wife from Hollywood Township, decided to vote absentee because Kelton planned to undergo knee replacement surgery at the end of October, and they decided it would be easier to vote beforehand. But their ballots were rejected because the address listed by their witness didn't match her address in the voter registry. The witness was their daughter.

"She moved from Carver County to McLeod County, and we didn't realize she had to register again at her new address," Kelton Adams testified.

Coleman says the Adams' votes should be counted; Franken says no. Under the late Friday ruling by the judges, the Adams' ballots appeared to remain in play at the trial as well.

Even if the judges agree with Coleman that thousands more ballots should be counted, it's no guarantee that the Republican could overcome Franken's 225-vote lead. The judges have already ordered that 23 rejected ballots of Franken supporters be counted, which will put the Democrat's lead at almost 250.

And Franken's attorneys say if the judges do decide to let in some or all of the ballots Coleman wants, that Franken in turn would produce a list of previously rejected ballots that fall into those same categories.
By Associated Press Writer Patrick Condon