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ST. PAUL — The trial on Minnesota’s U.S. Senate recount stalled on its first day Monday when the judges said photocopies of 5,000 excluded absentee ballots couldn’t be used as evidence because Republican Norm Coleman’s campaign workers had marked on them.
Coleman’s lawsuit argues in part that local election officials wrongly rejected many absentee ballots. Democrat Al Franken has a 225-vote lead and says any flaws are not substantial enough that they resulted in the wrong man winning.
The marks the campaign workers made included, in some cases, numbering or redaction of private information. After a Coleman witness admitted to the markings, Franken’s attorneys objected to using them as evidence because they had been altered.
