Today is the first day of the election contest trial for Minnesota's Senate seat. Proceedings begin at 2 pm EST. Franken's counsel, Marc Elias, held a conference call moments ago with reporters in which he accused the Coleman campaign of doing an "about face" in its effort to "count every vote" because earlier, while in the lead, they had been trying to prevent some votes from being counted. From among his comments: "They still seek to throw out the lawful ballots of 133 residents of Minneapolis. They seek to throw out 170 ballots from voters in Ramsey County . . . They continue to pose a hypothesis that there was duplicate balloting . . . Do not believe them when they say they want to count every vote."

 

Coleman, who trails by 225 votes in the official tally, would like to have a few thousand of some 13,000 rejected absentee ballots reinstated. Elias's words: "We have said all along that the vast majority of absentee ballots that were rejected were rejected properly . . . but that there was some subset of them that were improperly rejected. The 87 counties asserted that there were 1,340 that had been improperly rejected . . . At this point, the Coleman campaign was still saying there were zero . . . We go to this hearing today with the Coleman having changed that view, [asserting] . . . that the number is really 12,000."

 

For the record, Coleman's side makes the case for its position in this video.

 

Elias also accused Coleman of "going back to the flat earth society" by asserting the existence of duplicate ballots in one case and disputing the legitimacy of some ballots found after the election in another. It would hardly be a frivolous assertion if real people's votes are indeed being cancelled out by duplicates. Elias offered no opinion on how long the court would take to return any rulings, but the case is expected to last a few weeks.