Minn. Senate recount has no end in sight

ST. PETER, Minn. - Geri Pehrson will be the first to admit she doesn't pay a lot of attention to politics, but she does recall that Norm Coleman said there was no need for a recount after he had finished ahead by a couple of hundred votes in November's Minnesota Senate race.

Then, a recount put Al Franken up by a couple of hundred votes over Coleman. Pehrson said everything became a legal blur after that.

"I didn't think this would go on forever, but now I have my doubts," said Pehrson, who runs an antiques shop near St. Peter in southern Minnesota.

Five months after Minnesota voters thought they had elected a U.S. senator, perhaps they soon will get one. And perhaps not.

A legal ruling last week strongly suggests that Democrat Franken, the comedian-turned-politician, will eke out a narrow victory over Republican Coleman, the incumbent.

A state appeals court panel will meet tomorrow to oversee the counting of up to 400 absentee ballots, a potentially pivotal sliver of the 2.9 million votes cast in the fall. It eventually will rule on the disputed count, which currently has Franken up by 225 votes.

The outcome hinges, though, on when the court battles end. The painstaking reexamination of the November election has tried the patience of Minnesota voters, who have watched as lawyers, judges, and out-of-state politicians and bloggers weigh in on a race that doesn't seem to want to end.

Pehrson is not the only voter to suspect that the statewide election is being hijacked by out-of-state interests. Sen. John Cornyn (R., Texas) has promised "World War III" if Democrats try to seat Franken, and the GOP leadership in Washington has urged Coleman to continue appealing court rulings that he loses.

But to what end? asked residents in Nicollet County, one of the few counties in the state where voters were close to evenly split between Coleman and Franken.

"There has to be a time limit on this," said Lee Blue, a legal-software writer from St. Peter who voted for Franken. "Look at the situation with Al Gore in 2000. When Bush went ahead, Gore conceded. There has to be a point where someone takes the moral high ground."

Nonsense, said Mike Mans, a Nicollet insurance agent and Coleman supporter. "I'd like to see this go on forever."

So does the St. Paul Saints minor-league baseball team, which has planned a bobblehead doll night for May. The doll has the faces of Coleman and Franken on the same head, is dressed like Count von Count of Sesame Street, and is named Re-Count.

Franken has been ahead, based on a recount that was completed in early January, but continued legal challenges have prevented the election from being certified by Minnesota's secretary of state, Democrat Mark Ritchie, and Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

Until they certify the election result, Franken cannot take a seat in the Senate, meaning Democrats effectively have 58 seats instead of 59, and Minnesota has only one senator.

Coleman promised last week that he would appeal the coming appeals court ruling to the Minnesota Supreme Court, which almost certainly would delay any resolution at least until May. Other possible scenarios are going to the U.S. Supreme Court, which would drag things out further, or filing a lawsuit challenging the legitimacy of the November election.

"Clearly there is some impatience that this has dragged on for a long time. . . . There's a desire to put this thing out of its misery," said Larry Jacobs, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota. "Yet there is a solid majority that believes this has been handled very well, and they accept the legitimacy of the outcomes."

That could change, Jacobs cautioned, if Franken's lead is upheld by the Minnesota high court, Coleman appeals to the Supreme Court, and Pawlenty refuses to certify the election. Then, Jacobs said, "all hell could break loose."

This is new territory for Minnesota, which prides itself on orderliness and clean politics. In the 1962 governor's race, a state court ruled that Democrat Karl Rolvaag had defeated Republican Elmer Andersen by 91 votes.

Andersen declined to appeal the decision. That was a long time ago, and politics - even in comparatively genteel Minnesota - is not about surrendering in tight races.