--- title: Franken vs. Coleman: Still Counting in Minnesota description: Ever since the recount was completed, the two campaigns have been fighting over crucial handful of ballots that are being challenged for one reason or another canonical: https://time.com/archive/6687227/franken-vs-coleman-still-counting-in-minnesota/ author: Joel Stein article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2008-12-13T05:00:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-02-27T10:48:22.068Z article:section: Politics og:title: Franken vs. Coleman: Still Counting in Minnesota og:description: Ever since the recount was completed, the two campaigns have been fighting over crucial handful of ballots that are being challenged for one reason or another og:url: https://time.com/archive/6687227/franken-vs-coleman-still-counting-in-minnesota/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt33aeaf7a447642df/698a473709208f80eb41b75c/360_wrecount_1222.jpg?branch=production&width=750&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: 360_wrecount_1222.jpg og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Franken vs. Coleman: Still Counting in Minnesota twitter:description: Ever since the recount was completed, the two campaigns have been fighting over crucial handful of ballots that are being challenged for one reason or another twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt33aeaf7a447642df/698a473709208f80eb41b75c/360_wrecount_1222.jpg?branch=production&width=750&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [Politics](/section/politics/) # Franken vs. Coleman: Still Counting in Minnesota by [Joel Stein](https://time.com/author/joel-stein/) Dec 13, 2008 5:00 AM UTC  The voter marked both ovals, then crossed out the one for Coleman. The voter marked both ovals, then crossed out the one for Coleman. by [Joel Stein](https://time.com/author/joel-stein/) Dec 13, 2008 5:00 AM UTC What if the 2000 presidential election had hinged not on a diverse, messy, weird and slightly creepy hick state like Florida but on the most organized, practical and cordial one in the Union: Minnesota? What if, instead of going to court after court over hanging chads and butterfly ballots and whether a recount should happen, election officials had just calmly looked at each ballot and tried to figure out what the voter wanted? That’s exactly what’s going on in Minnesota, where 2.9 million voters left Senator Norm Coleman just 215 votes ahead of Saturday Night Live star Al Franken. Since then, both sides have politely allowed a legally required hand recount to take place, one with very clearly specified rules and no scheduled end date. Of course, the recount ended precisely on Dec. 5, just as Minnesota’s secretary of state had predicted, and the result didn’t, of course, differ much from the initial count. “We didn’t have to do a lot of overtime,” says Cindy Reichert, the elections director of Minneapolis. “We did do some evenings. But we’re very organized.” If it had been Minnesota instead of Florida in 2000, this is what we would have found out: Voters are idiots. You make a clear, statewide ballot with neat little ovals to fill in? Some voters will put in check marks and X’s. They’ll fill out two ovals. They’ll mark one candidate’s oval in ink, try to erase that mark and then put their initials next to their correction, even though there’s a law on the books forbidding voters to sign their ballots, to prevent voter bribing. They’ll scrawl something about taxes in that oval, or about lizard people. You spend enough time trying to figure out the intentions of some voters, and you’ll learn their real intention is to be put into special care. This is what democracy comes to. It’s sloppy and human. Just like asking a kid to count two dozen cupcakes. If you ask human beings to count 2.9 million ballots–even if those human beings are Minnesotans–you’re going to get a slightly different number every time. Envelopes whose contents were counted the first night are lost. Absentee ballots that were never counted turn up. Some people get their votes invalidated by accident. The main point of contention between the Franken and Coleman camps involves an envelope of 133 ballots from the not-exactly-shenanigans-prone University Lutheran Church of Hope in Minneapolis that got counted late on election night, then transported to a warehouse, and seems to have gone missing in the recount. Everyone spent a day combing the place as if they were on a CSI episode, but to no avail. “You’d love to find it,” says Mark Ritchie, Minnesota’s secretary of state. “Out of 3 million ballots, to have one envelope missing, you know, darn it.” You know, darn it is the Minnesota equivalent of self-flagellation. The other disagreement is over whether to count absentee ballots that were mistakenly rejected by local election officials around the state. When the Franken camp asked for and got a list of why each ballot was rejected, it discovered some ballots were thrown away for something besides the four legally specified reasons. So most of the reasonable election officials of the Minnesota counties started sorting the rejected ballots into five neat little piles, in case the state canvassing board decides at its meeting on Dec. 12 that those ballots should count. One of those fifth-pile votes, the Franken camp discovered, belonged to Erick Garcia Luna, the chairman of the state Democratic Latino caucus, who voted absentee because he was volunteering the day of the election. Like many people from Latin America, Garcia Luna has two last names, and Minnesotans aren’t used to Latin Americans. So it seems logical that some election official looked up his last name under Luna instead of Garcia and determined he wasn’t registered, even though he was. Garcia Luna, who just became a citizen this year, is hopeful that his vote will be counted by the canvassing board. “If you look at the mathematics, I’m like 5% of what Franken needs to win. I feel very upset. Also very important.” But Garcia Luna isn’t sore at the Coleman campaign for not wanting his vote counted. Though he only recently became a Minnesotan, he already sounds as if he were born here. “It’s just politics,” he says. “We divide partisanship from civics.” The Franken side is pushing for more ballots to be included in the recount, partly because it has nothing to lose (it’s behind) and partly because, historically, Democrats screw up their ballots more often than Republicans. They’re the shaky-handed elderly, the movement-limited disabled, the instruction-confused immigrants, the first-time-voting minorities. But despite this tension, the two law teams have been pleasant toward each other. Franken lead attorney Marc Elias, who was head counsel for the John Kerry campaign, says, “It’s been cordial. I’ve met Coleman’s lawyer, Mr. Knaak, three times. He seems like a nice fellow.” In fact, each side independently has taken back hundreds of ballot challenges it made during the review process that were frivolous. On Dec. 16, the state canvassing board will review each of the remaining several thousand confusing ballots with an overhead projector for the public, decide which count and declare a winner before Christmas, well before the U.S. Senate is seated on Jan. 6\. The five-member board was chosen by Democratic secretary of state Ritchie, but both sides are satisfied with his appointments. To prepare himself, Ritchie not only watched HBO’s movie about the Florida recount, but he watched it in a particularly Minnesotan way. “I was especially interested in the bonus features of the disc,” he says. Meantime, reviewing the wacky ballots–available to the public as PDF files–is by far the most popular activity on the Minneapolis–St. Paul Star Tribune website. All the sensible, civic-minded spirit doesn’t guarantee the losing camp won’t sue when it’s all over. But Minnesota law, which was perfected after a gubernatorial recount in 1962, has a plan in case of a dead tie: a coin flip. The state already did one this year for a school-board seat in Farmington. Ritchie has been looking around for a good coin for the Coleman-Franken race; he says the quarter with Minnesota on the back is the way to go. “I was watching Leatherheads, the football movie, and you realize there are angles on coin-tossing as well. Who flips it? Who calls it?” By next year, rest assured, Minnesota will have the best coin-flipping law anywhere. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6687227/franken-vs-coleman-still-counting-in-minnesota/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6687227/franken-vs-coleman-still-counting-in-minnesota/"},"headline":"Franken vs. Coleman: Still Counting in Minnesota","datePublished":"2008-12-13T05:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-02-27T10:48:22.068Z","description":"Ever since the recount was completed, the two campaigns have been fighting over crucial handful of ballots that are being challenged for one reason or another","url":"https://time.com/archive/6687227/franken-vs-coleman-still-counting-in-minnesota/","keywords":[],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt33aeaf7a447642df/698a473709208f80eb41b75c/360_wrecount_1222.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Joel Stein","url":"https://time.com/author/joel-stein/"}],"articleSection":"Politics","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt33aeaf7a447642df/698a473709208f80eb41b75c/360_wrecount_1222.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"360_wrecount_1222.jpg","caption":"The voter marked both ovals, then crossed out the one for Coleman.","creditText":"","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/politics/","name":"Politics"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/archive/6687227/franken-vs-coleman-still-counting-in-minnesota/","name":"Franken vs. Coleman: Still Counting in Minnesota"}}]}] ```