i think that if i were the frankin campaign and coleman reversed there decision on this ballot, I would reject it because it is no longer a secret ballot now that she has publicly declared who the vote is for. They have already rejected lots of ballots for people signing them.

Yep, Graham has pretty much made a hash of her ballot and of the process.

The fine-grained nature of this process could end up coming into the court challenges -- both campaigns know the names on the absentee ballots, and although it would obviously be bad form to contact people and ask how they voted, it would be easy enough to look at other potential indicators of individual voting behavior when deciding whether to accept or reject a ballot. In addtion, in a fair number of jurisdictions there will be few enough additional absentee ballots counted that some people's votes could be revealed.

Wouldn't this ballot have to be rejected now that she has disclosed the contents of the sealed envelope?

And for SqueakyRat; Coleman has made his argument for rejecting the ballot and cannot be allowed to change is mind now that he knows it's a vote for him.

Just so it isn't missed, may I point out that the only reason we heard this story is that the Minnesota recount process is incredibly transparent. We're getting bashed for the process being prolonged and chaotic. It's prolonged, but that's to stop the chaos. Other states have the machines recount, make the same errors, and spend time fighting over whether to have a hand recount.

It's not really accurate to refer to a Minnesota election judge as an "election official." Election judges are simply volunteers who run the polls on election day.

The reason many election judges vote absentee is that they frequently are assigned to precincts other than their own.

I have a question.

Since this person chose to reveal what their vote was BEFORE IT WAS DETERMINED WHETHER TO COUNT IT OR NOT, does that not AUTOMATICALLY DISQUALIFY IT?

I thought they were NOT supposed to know the content of the ballot until AFTER it was determined whether to count it or not.

So in disclosing what is supposed to be privileged information, did she not just automatically render her vote 'invalid'?

Both camps are full of national political pros.

It seems to me, though, that Coleman is playing the Al Gore recount method (i.e. "I want a recount of only these two counties."). Folks that are following it -- even those who support Coleman -- are starting to understand what's going on here. If we know that state officials identified over 1300 absentee ballots that were improperly rejected, why not count all 1,300 ballots? Why is this so difficult? And, most importantly, why do the campaigns get to decide if absentees should be counted -- and not the election officials?