ST. PAUL -- Minnesota voters -- and even politically engaged college students -- have little interest in details of the prolonged U.S. Senate election trial, a professor monitoring the proceeding said.
"I think they're lost," Bemidji State University journalism instructor Louise Mengelkoch said Friday. "I don't know anybody who follows it, because it's infuriating."
Mengelkoch has monitored the trial, heading into its fifth week, on the Internet but spent part of Friday observing the proceedings in the St. Paul courtroom.
"I'm fascinated by it just because it's so excruciating," Mengelkoch said, adding that her students do not share her interest
The case started at a painfully slow pace, but has moved faster in recent days. The trial's 20th day saw a flurry of legal requests from Norm Coleman's campaign amid continued testimony from local election officials about how they decided which absentee ballots to include in the Nov. 4 election and the Senate recount.
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Whether certain absentee ballots were wrongly rejected in the election tally is a key issue in Coleman's lawsuit. He is challenging Al Franken's 225-vote victory following the statewide recount of 2.9 million votes.
Coleman's campaign called five county officials to the witness stand Friday.
Carolyn Holmsten, Goodhue County's elections chief, faced questions about a handful of absentee ballots that she and other Goodhue County election workers rejected in the election. Some of those ballots fall into categories Coleman's campaign wants considered for possible counting in the trial. Franken's attorneys wondered why others were rejected.
The local officials' testimony was overshadowed by the campaigns' maneuvering inside and outside the courtroom.
Coleman's campaign continued to claim some ballots included in the election tally would be considered illegally cast under a recent ruling by the three-judge panel.
The campaign said if the judges do not reconsider their recent ruling that blocked some types of absentee ballots from being included in the trial, the court would have to go back through all absentee ballots cast in the election to find those that would be considered illegal under the recent decision.
Franken's team said Coleman's team was trying to back out of an agreement it made about some absentee ballots and to cast doubt on the trial.
"This is the next step in the attack on the integrity of Minnesota's election system and, I believe, a step toward attacking the legitimacy of this proceeding," Franken attorney David Lillehaug said.
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Scott Wente works for Forum Communications Co., which owns the News Tribune.
