Among the ballots the Norm Coleman campaign is challenging in a lawsuit filed Tuesday are three from precincts in St. Louis County -- one from near Hibbing and two from Duluth.
Coleman is challenging Democrat Al Franken's apparent recount victory, alleging election and recount irregularities that caused some ballots to be wrongly counted and others to be improperly excluded.
The three St. Louis County absentee ballots -- out of about 120,000 votes cast -- originally were sent to voters by e-mail, said Paul Tynjala, the election administrator for St. Louis County. Once completed and returned, however, they weren't the right size to be run through a voting machine. That required election judges to make duplicate copies of the ballots so they could be counted.
In the majority of cases, Tynjala said, the judges did the duplications correctly. But in some instances, the original ballot and its duplicate weren't properly marked. In those cases, Tynjala said, three things could happen: The ballot might not be counted at all; it could be counted only once; or it could be sent to the state canvassing board and counted a second time even though it already had been counted.
Tynjala said he doesn't know whether the state canvassing board double-counted the three ballots in question.
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Tony Trimble, an attorney for the Coleman campaign, maintains they were. Trimble also said there may be more ballots in St. Louis County and across the state that could have been counted twice.
"We're still doing a lot of discovery and review," he said.
The Franken campaign could not be reached for comment.
