As Aaron noted yesterday, the State Canvassing Board has officially certified the election results with Franken winning by 225 votes (can anyone verify that this is the smallest percentage margin for a Senate race in the history of the United States?). Finally, we can say with certainty that Al Franken won the election in November. On this count, the Strib reports some relevant information (emphasis mine):
[Ritchie] pointed out that 95 percent of the Canvassing Board’s decisions, including the most significant ones, were unanimous.
After the board’s meeting, Franken recount attorney Marc Elias said: “Today is a great day for the people of Minnesota. I can now say, with no uncertainty left, that Al Franken has won this election by 225 votes, [and] that he will be the next senator from the state of Minnesota, and that this process worked.”
While sidestepping questions about the upcoming legal challenge, Elias told reporters that the Coleman campaign’s success rate in court actions during the recount was “not particularly good.”
Ritchie’s point is important here because there is no doubt a fair amount of skepticism surrounding the final result and, although I disagree, I don’t blame anyone who is thinking that way right now — after all, the margin of victory would intuitively seem to be within the margin of error. But here’s where Ritchie’s point is important — 95% of the decisions were straight-forward, no-brainers, with no disagreement. And when we had 6000 challenged ballots, with the board deciding significantly fewer than that number after the campaigns withdrew some challenges, one would have to assume that the Board leaned Franken so heavily that they favored Franken in every single toss-up situation (more than 5%) for the Board to come out on Coleman’s side. And as anyone watching the recount can attest, that just isn’t true (just watch the number of times Pawlenty appointed SC Judge Magnuson won the toss-ups).
The second part of the above excerpt I wanted to draw attention to is Franken Attorney, Marc Elias’s quote. Namely, Elias is objectively correct — Coleman’s success rate on legal challenges so far has been abysmal. And my understanding (and I may be wrong here, I’m not 100% sure) is that the burden for the “contests” post-certification now shifts to the contesting party; meaning that the bar for Coleman’s contested legal issues has been raised.
Either way, I’m sure that Former Senator Coleman will drag out this misery until the final door is closed, but right now two things can be said with a fair amount of certainty: the official, certified results of the election show Al Franken as Minnesota’s elected Senator, and there do not appear to be any avenues left that lead Coleman to a reversal of that result.
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