ST. PAUL -- Attorneys for Sen. Norm Coleman's re-election campaign say they have identified 300 absentee ballots from St. Louis County that were counted on election night but that would be illegal under a recent decision by recount trial judges.
Those "illegal" ballots represent more votes than the 225 that separated Democrat Al Franken from Republican Coleman after the recount, said Coleman's attorney Ben Ginsberg.
The Coleman campaign gave reporters copies of the St. Louis County absentee ballot documents outside the courtroom this evening. It was an attempt to illustrate an issue the Coleman campaign has tried to raise for the past week -- that the court should reconsider its ruling excluding some types of uncounted ballots from the trial -- but that the judges so far have rejected.
There are similar problems in counties around the state, Ginsberg said, but the campaign highlighted St. Louis County because it expects Franken's campaign to call a St. Louis County election official to testify in the trial.
St. Louis County voters favored Franken in the election by a 55 percent to 32 percent margin; 12 percent voted for Dean Barkley.
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Ginsberg said the 300 ballots contained problems including missing voter and witness signatures and address discrepancies. One envelope had no voter information, but the ballot inside still was counted, the campaign said.
Ginsberg repeated his key argument from the past week that the court's decision to exclude some absentee ballots from consideration in the trial is problematic because similar ballots were counted in the election.
"The court has the responsibility to reconcile the issues," he said.
