ST. PAUL, Minn. – Minnesota voters testified Tuesday their ballots had been unfairly rejected as Republican Norm Coleman argued thousands of disqualified absentee ballots should be counted in the U.S. Senate race.

“Perhaps my signature is not as good as it once was,” Gerald Anderson, of St. Paul, told the three-judge panel hearing Coleman’s lawsuit. “It gets cloudy and crooked. I am 75 years old.”

But that shouldn’t have disqualified his vote, he said: “I want it back. I’m entitled to my vote.”

A statewide recount gave Democrat Al Franken a 225-vote edge.

The personal stories that Anderson and five other voters told are just one front on Coleman’s effort to have more votes counted. Coleman’s legal team had intended to submit copies of thousands of ballots as exhibits, but the judges disqualified them as evidence Monday because campaign workers had marked on some envelopes. On Tuesday, much of the panel’s time was spent with state officials, lawyers and court staff working out a plan to get about 11,000 rejected absentees to St. Paul from counties throughout the state.

Actual testimony didn’t begin until afternoon in the case, expected to last weeks.

It wasn’t clear whom Anderson supported; neither Coleman’s nor Franken’s attorneys asked. And Anderson wasn’t sure why his vote was rejected, only guessing that it was his signature.

Minnesota law cites four reasons for rejecting absentee ballots: The name and address on the ballot’s envelope do not match a name and address on the voter rolls; the signature on the envelope doesn’t match the voter’s signature on file; the voter was not registered when he or she voted; or the voter went on to vote on Election Day too.

Coleman is arguing that in many cases, those standards were applied differently from county to county, violating the constitutional standard of equal protection.

Hundreds of improperly rejected absentee ballots were opened and added to the count during the recount phase through a process set up by the Minnesota Supreme Court – a process that gave both campaigns a say in which ballots were added.

Franken’s attorneys argue that only about 654 remaining absentees were rejected improperly and merit being brought into the count.

MINNEAPOLIS  – The morning after the Nov. 4 election, Norm Coleman stood before TV cameras, declared victory in Minnesota’s U.S. Senate election and said that if he were opponent Al Franken he’d “step back.”

Two months later, Coleman finds himself down by nearly the same margin he appeared to hold over Franken that day. His lawyers said Coleman – who later expressed regret at that post-election remark – is not ready to step back, promising a lawsuit that’s likely to keep the race in limbo for several more months.

Minnesota’s Canvassing Board on Monday certified that Democrat Franken won 225 more votes than Republican Coleman, out of almost 3 million cast. Franken took his own opportunity to declare himself the victor.

“I am proud to stand before you as the next senator from Minnesota,” the former “Saturday Night Live” personality told reporters in brief remarks outside his downtown Minneapolis condominium. But Franken’s ability to claim the seat immediately is in doubt. Minnesota law prohibits final certification of a winner until a legal challenge is resolved, and Senate Republicans have indicated they would filibuster if necessary to block Franken from participating when new senators are sworn in Tuesday.

Franken took no questions during his brief appearance Monday, and his campaign aides refused to reveal if he would be in Washington on Tuesday to try to participate in the swearing-in. A spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said there would not be any effort to seat Franken on Tuesday.

Coleman, whose term in office ended on Saturday, was in Washington when the Canvassing Board declared him the loser of the recount. His campaign said he would speak publicly in Minnesota on Tuesday.

The Canvassing Board’s certification of the recount results started a seven-day clock for Coleman to file a lawsuit. His attorney, Tony Trimble, said Monday afternoon that the challenge would be filed within 24 hours.

“This process isn’t at an end,” Trimble said. “It is now just at the beginning.”

When the smoke cleared after the election, Coleman appeared to hold a 215-vote lead. But Franken made up the deficit over seven tortuous weeks of ballot-sifting, in part by prevailing on more challenges that both campaigns brought to thousands of ballots.

Franken also did better than Coleman when election officials opened and counted more than 900 absentee ballots that had erroneously been disqualified on Election Day.

Coleman’s lawyers have argued that some ballots were mishandled and others were wrongly excluded from the recount, giving Franken an unfair advantage. Such claims are likely to be a major feature of any lawsuit.

Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, a Democrat, was careful to note that the board was simply signing off on the numbers found by the recount: Franken, with 1,212,431 votes, and Coleman, with 1,212,206 votes.

“We’re not doing anything today that declares winners or losers or anything to that effect,” Ritchie said.

All five members of the canvassing board – Ritchie, plus two state Supreme Court justices and two Ramsey County judges – voted to accept the recount results. And the four judges, including two appointees of Republican governors, praised Ritchie and his staff as being fair and diligent.

A lawsuit would extend the fight over the seat for months. Any court case would open doors closed to the campaigns during the administrative recount. They would be able to access voter rolls, inspect machines and get testimony from election workers.

The case would fall to a three-judge panel picked by Chief Justice Eric Magnuson of the Supreme Court. Magnuson served on the Canvassing Board, but declined to say Monday if he would remove himself from the selection process as a result. Magnuson was an appointee of Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

Costs of the election lawsuit fall to the campaigns. But there is a provision in state law that exposes the government to costs if prior results are reversed due to an irregularity in election procedure.

ST. PAUL, Minn. – Democrat Al Franken withdrew 633 challenges to ballots Wednesday in Minnesota’s U.S. Senate race in what could be a first step toward a quicker conclusion to the recount.

Franken’s attorney, Marc Elias, said many more withdrawals are likely. An attorney for Republican Norm Coleman said he may follow suit soon.

Any reduction in the pile of challenged ballots – more than 6,000 so far – will alleviate work for the canvassing board that meets Dec. 16 to begin examining those ballots.

Coleman defeated Franken in the election by 215 votes, a margin so small that it triggered an automatic recount. By Wednesday night, Coleman led by 316 votes, according to recount totals posted by Minnesota’s secretary of state. But that apparent lead was far overshadowed by the thousands of ballots challenged by the two campaigns.

Each candidate has challenged about the same number of votes. The Franken campaign mailed a letter to Secretary of State Mark Ritchie on Wednesday with a list of specific challenges to discard.

“If there are challenges that are without merit, it doesn’t do either side any good to have them considered,” Elias said.

Coleman’s attorney, Fritz Knaak, said the Republican’s campaign has also been considering a withdrawal of some challenges but wouldn’t do so until after Friday, the deadline for the recount to end.

“We don’t want to send the wrong message to our volunteers still working at the recount sites,” Knaak said.

Challenges range from ballots with votes for more than one candidate to many that simply had a pen scribble somewhere on the ballot. The number of challenges far exceeds the margin between the two men, making it difficult to pin down which candidate the recount is favoring.

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. – Republican U.S. Rep. Virgil H. Goode has made it official: He wants a recount in his narrow loss to Democrat Tom Perriello.

Attorneys for the six-term incumbent filed a petition Tuesday in Albermarle County Circuit Court requesting the recount.

The filling came a day after the State Board of Elections certified Democrat Tom Perriello as the winner by 745 votes out of more than 316,000 cast in the 5th District race. The margin of 0.24 percentage points entitles Goode to a recount at taxpayer expense. Perriello has said he doesn’t believe there’s any serious chance of the result changing.

A one-seat partisan advantage in Virginia’s congressional delegation is at stake.

ST. PAUL, Minn. – With just a fifth of the state’s precincts left to go in Minnesota’s Senate recount, supporters of

Democrat Al Franken and Republican Norm Coleman remain in the hunt for ballots that could tip the balance to their candidate.

Tensions rose on Monday at sites where ballots were getting a second look, with the campaigns each accusing the other of running up the challenges.

In Ramsey County, volunteers for both Franken and Coleman were flagging ballots with hard-to-find stray pen marks for review by the state Canvassing Board. County Elections Manager Joe Mansky had to flip a few of them over more than once just to find the offending mark.

“We just had some people who were inclined to challenge just about everything,” Mansky said.

Coleman led Franken by 215 votes before the recount. Through Monday, the margin was 172, a comparison made possible because counties are reporting recount numbers that compare directly with their precincts’ Nov. 4 results.

Those numbers are expected to shift daily until the counties complete their work. And the final outcome will likely rest on the 2,801 ballot challenges filed by the two campaigns, due to be taken up by the Canvassing Board Dec. 16.

Meanwhile, Franken’s campaign sounded alarms over discrepancies in the number of ballots that registered on Nov. 4 versus the number tallied during the recount. They sought the secretary of state’s help in investigating reports of “missing” ballots.

“For a hand count of ballots to be accurate, all ballots counted must be made available for review,” Franken attorney David Lillehaug said in a letter to Secretary of State Mark Ritchie.

Lillehaug continued, “In an election this close, and with accuracy and transparency paramount, these differences are a serious matter.”

Deputy Secretary of State Jim Gelbmann said his office was reviewing Franken’s letter but had not yet had a chance to consider all the implications.

The final result has implications beyond Minnesota. Depending on another undecided contest in Georgia, the Minnesota outcome could determine whether Democrats attain a 60-seat majority that would enable them to overcome Republican filibusters.

As of Monday evening, 2.1 million of nearly 2.9 million ballots had been recounted and 64 of 87 counties were done. Elections in the state are done on paper ballots fed into scanners; those ballots are now being recounted by hand.

It’s difficult to say exactly where the race stands because both campaigns have challenged hundreds of ballots. Unless the campaigns withdraw their challenges, they will be decided by the Canvassing Board.

Hypervigilance, an abiding regard for the rules, and, yes, some of that good old Minnesota Nice marked the opening Wednesday of the hand recount here and across the state to determine the winner of the United States Senate race in Minnesota.

ST. PAUL, Minn. – Minnesota’s deadlocked U.S. Senate race will edge closer to resolution on Wednesday as an army of election workers begin a statewide recount of more than 2.9 million ballots.

The state Canvassing Board, which will eventually declare a winner in the race between incumbent Republican Norm Coleman and

Democrat Al Franken, signed off Tuesday on the manual recount. The board postponed a decision on how to handle rejected absentee ballots.

Board members wanted more time to consider arguments over the absentee ballots. Secretary of State Mark Ritchie said they’d convene again next week, before the Thanksgiving holiday.

The recount is required under state law because the votes cast for Coleman and Franken differed by less than one-half of 1 percent. The incumbent Coleman’s 215-vote lead heading into the recount translates to 0.008 percent.

Franken is pressing to include absentee ballots his campaign says were rejected on technicalities. Campaign lawyer David

Lillehaug argued the board has the power to add them to the count.

“They have a right to have official mistakes corrected and their votes counted. Not later, but now,” he said of voters in that situation. “This board has the full authority, and indeed we submit, the obligation to do exactly that.”

Coleman’s campaign contends that rejected ballots should be kept from the recount and considered only if the election result winds up in court.

“There is no precedent for what’s being requested of this body by the Franken campaign and we see no reason why a different procedure should be followed at this late juncture in our history,” said Fritz Knaak, Coleman’s lead attorney.

Separately, the Franken campaign has sued to obtain the names of voters with invalidated absentee ballots. A hearing in the case is scheduled for Wednesday.

The recount will be done in more than 100 sites across the state over the next 2½ weeks. A month from now, the canvassing board will reconvene to rule on disputed ballots and certify the election.

The five-member board is made up of the secretary of state, two Supreme Court justices and two district judges.

WASHINGTON – This time, there are no hanging chads.

Yet the Republicans’ drive to derail an abuse of power investigation against Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the GOP vice presidential candidate, reflects the same determination and many of the same methods employed in shutting down the 2000 presidential recount in Florida.

Now, as then, the playbook includes lawsuits, the exercise of power by sympathetic state officials, and appeals to the court of public opinion – all in an operation directed by out-of-state Republicans.

“Hold me accountable,” Palin said when the Republican-controlled legislature launched the investigation in mid-August.

Now John McCain’s running mate, she declines to cooperate. She calls the investigation tainted, her husband won’t honor a subpoena to testify, and Republican lawmakers are in court with a pair of lawsuits challenging the legitimacy of the probe.

Republican lawyers, researchers and public relations specialists have been dispatched to Alaska. The Anchorage lawyer originally hired by the state to represent Palin is no longer paid by taxpayers and instead is part of the McCain-Palin campaign’s legal team.

Former prosecutor Ed O’Callaghan, from New York, is the team’s leading voice. “The investigation is no longer a legitimate investigation because it has been subjected to complete partisanship and does not operate with the authority that it had at the time of its initial authorization,” he told reporters earlier in the week.

Even though lawmakers announced plans for new subpoenas on Friday, there appears little chance that investigator Stephen Branchflower will receive testimony from all the witnesses he seeks before his Oct. 10 target date for completion.

That’s nearly four weeks before Election Day, the date by which Troopergate, as it is known, can no longer affect McCain’s chances of winning the White House.

And Democrats are not without their own maneuvers – casting Palin in an unfavorable light with allegations that Republican presidential candidate John McCain and his party are playing politics with the issue.

“The Republican presidential campaign is doing everything it can to stall and smear,” says Patti Higgins, chairwoman of the Alaska Democratic Party.

So far, the struggle has been largely one-sided. Advantage: Republicans and Palin, the governor whose firing of Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan triggered the controversy this summer.

Critics say Monegan was fired because he refused to dismiss a state trooper who had gone through a difficult divorce with the governor’s sister. Palin says she acted in response to a disagreement with Monegan over state spending.

Whatever her motivation, Republicans have acted as though they could not afford to allow Branchflower to complete his probe before the election.

The similarities to the contested Florida recount of 2000 are striking, if imprecise – the uncertain outcome of a complete manual recount then, the unpredictability of a full accounting of the
Monegan firing now.

Then, Bush clung to a slender lead in Florida over Al Gore after a statewide machine recount. Democrats sought a follow-up manual re-tally by hand in four counties, and Republicans determined to block them.

Given a margin of a few hundred votes out of millions cast, it was impossible to tell who had truly won the state. There were numerous disputed paper ballots – including those with partially-punched out holes that became instantly known by the phrase “hanging chads.

Republicans also were fearful of forfeiting their advantage in the public relations battle. Their man was ahead, and any reduction in his lead could only undermine his claim on the White House.

Lawsuits tumbled on top of one another, eventually involving Florida’s highest court and U.S. Supreme Court.

Katherine Harris, the Republican secretary of state, was stopped by court order from certifying the results once – a ruling issued by seven judges appointed by Democrats, Republicans noted.

One county canvassing board, besieged by Republican protesters, shut down the recount Democrats sought. Harris refused to accept results from another county, submitted 90 minutes past the court-imposed deadline of 5 p.m. on Nov. 26.

That day, she certified Bush the winner of Florida by 537 votes – and the tally stood despite days of additional lawyering and hand-counting.

The stakes are not nearly as large this time, and Democrats have appeared slow off the mark, unwilling or unable to dispatch their own crew to Alaska to counter the Republicans.

And while there is no direct equivalent of Harris, Alaska’s Republican attorney general, Talis Colberg, has played a pivotal, if quiet, role in trying to bottle up the investigation of the woman who appointed him.

When Branchflower sought to subpoena 10 employees of Palin’s administration, Colberg reponded with a letter that said they had been placed in a untenable position.

“As state employees, our clients have taken an oath to uphold the Alaska Constitution,” he wrote.

Yet, he added, “our clients are also loyal employees subject to the supervision of the Governor” whom he said has stated that the subpoenas were of questionable validity.

“We respectfully ask that you withdraw the subpoenas directed to our clients and thereby relieve them from the circumstance of having to choose where their loyalties lie,” he added.