Election Update

In Virginia, bigot US Representative Virgil Goode has conceded after a recount failed to turn around his 745 vote deficit.

In Minnesota, we have the Franken campaign suing Olmsted County some absentee ballots that were accepted, but then accidentally placed in the wrong pile, and so were not counted.

I would have thought that this one would not require the filing of a lawsuit, but I'm naive, I guess.

In any case, it was Norm's big day in court, and while there were no rulings, it does appear that the Minnesota Supreme Court was unamused with the Coleman campaign.

Part of it hay have had to do with Coleman's lawyer using the "F-Word" in court....No, not that f-word....I mean that he used the word Florida.

Roger Magnuson wasted no time in bringing up Florida. In fact, the attorney’s first utterance before the Minnesota Supreme Court this afternoon referenced the legal debacle of 2000. Representing Sen. Norm Coleman’s campaign, Magnuson argued that the state canvassing board’s actions of December 12, when it recommended that all 87 counties count wrongly rejected absentee ballots, were an “an invitation to go to Florida.”

But before Magnuson could begin to back up this assertion, he was interrupted by a clearly irritated Justice Paul Anderson. “This is not Florida,” he stated. “I’m just not terribly receptive to you telling us this is Florida.”

So it went throughout the one-hour hearing before the Supreme Court today, with the justices repeatedly interrupting and questioning attorneys for both campaigns. The justices seemed more interested in Andersen v. Rolvaag, the 1962 Minnesota Supreme Court case that helped decide the state’s deadlocked gubernatorial race, than Bush v. Gore.

(emphasis mine)