In their fight to overturn the U.S. Senate recount, Norm Coleman's legal team has begun pressing some Minnesota counties for documents on hundreds of thousands of ballots that were not previously disputed.
The lawsuit that Coleman filed last week to erase DFLer Al Franken's 225-vote lead cites a few dozen specific ballot errors that he says favored Franken. But Coleman's camp is also now casting a much wider net for other mistakes that could cost Franken votes.
The latest requests, dealing with approved absentee ballots and precinct voter rosters, are frustrating some counties. "You're talking 30,000, 40,000 pages of documents," said Stearns County elections chief Dave Walz, referring to his county alone. Joe Mansky, Ramsey County's election director, said the county has received requests for copies of "over 200,000 pieces of paper" from the campaigns.
Coleman's new strategy comes as some elections officials are expressing skepticism over his campaign's unproven assumptions that some votes were counted twice and that some absentee ballots were wrongly rejected or accepted.