This Is Not Florida How Al Franken Won the Minnesota Senate Recount by Jay Weiner Publication date: October 2010
University of Minnesota Press $24.95 Hardcover ISBN 978-0-8166-7038-3 268 pages 6 X 9
The behind-the-scenes story of the historic Franken—Coleman Minnesota Senate recount
On July 7, 2009, Al Franken was sworn in as Minnesota’s junior U.S. senator—eight months after Election Night. In the chill of November 2008, Republican incumbent Norm Coleman led by a slim 215 votes, a margin that triggered an automatic statewide recount of more than 2.9 million ballots. Minnesota’s ensuing recount, and the contentious legal and public relations battle that would play out between the Franken and Coleman lawyers and staff, simultaneously fascinated and frustrated Minnesotans and the nation—all while a filibuster- proof Senate hung in the balance.
This Is Not Florida is the behind-the-scenes saga of the largest, longest, and most expensive election recount in American history. Reporter Jay Weiner covered the entire recount. Based on daily reporting as well as interviews, This Is Not Florida dives into the motivations of key players in the drama, including the exploits of Franken’s lead attorney Marc Elias; reveals some of the mistakes made by Coleman advisers; and explains how the Franken team’s devotion to data collection helped Franken win the recount by a mere 312 votes.
In a fascinating, blow-by-blow account of the historic recount that captivated people nationwide, Jay Weiner gets inside campaign war rooms and judges’ chambers and takes the reader from the uncertainties of Election Night 2008, through the controversial State Canvassing Board and a grueling eight-week trial, to an appeal to Minnesota’s Supreme Court, and finally to Al Franken’s long-awaited swearing-in.
This Is Not Florida presents an unforgettable moment in political history that proved that it’s never really over until it’s actually over.
Jay Weiner reported on the 2008 U.S. Senate recount and election contest for MinnPost.com, a Minneapolis–St. Paul news Web site. For his coverage, he received Minnesota’s prestigious Frank Premack Public Affairs Journalism Award. A longtime Twin Cities sportswriter, he is the author of Stadium Games: Fifty Years of Big League Greed and Bush League Boondoggles (Minnesota, 2000). He lives and works in St. Paul.
Please consider a review or feature of This Is Not Florida, or an interview with the author. Please contact Heather Skinner, Publicist, at [email protected] with questions, requests, or comments.
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Q&A with Jay Weiner Author of This Is Not Florida How Al Franken Won the Minnesota Senate Recount Publication date: October 2010
University of Minnesota Press $24.95 Hardcover ISBN 978-0-8166-7038-3 268 pages 6 X 9
1. You were a sports writer for 30 years. How in the world did you get into writing a book about the Al Franken-Norm Coleman Senate recount?
Quite serendipitously. I had just returned from covering the 2008 Summer Olympics for a number of news organizations. I had set up a one-man news bureau in Beijing. MinnPost.com, the then-fledgling Web site in Minneapolis-St. Paul, was one of my main outlets. I had been writing for MinnPost since its inception in the fall of 2007, which was soon after I left the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
After I returned from China, sometime in October the editors at MinnPost wondered if I would ever consider covering politics. I said, "Why not?" I'd been around stadium finance politics for 15 years. But never, really, electoral politics. I wrote a couple of features about local election issues, but nothing about the Franken-Coleman campaign. Indeed, I barely followed the campaign because of my Olympics immersion.
A week after Election Day, the MinnPost guys asked: "Can you help out on the recount?" "Help out" turned into eight months, all day, everyday, full-time.
2. Covering an event is one thing, but writing a book? Why?
I'd been around the recount for about a month and was sitting, bored stiff, at a state Canvassing Board meeting. I had written an impressionistic piece about the day-to-day rhythm of the recount. I’ve peppered some of those impressions about Franken lawyer Marc Elias and Coleman lawyer Fritz Knaak throughout the book.
Eric Schultz, Al Franken's communications director, sidled up to me during a lull in a hearing and said, "You should write the book about this." I said, "No way. No money. No knowledge. Didn't cover the campaign. Got other stuff to do."
Well, I got to thinking. And then the darned recount lasted into 2009, and there I was in a courtroom everyday for two months and began to outline the project. And here we are.
3. The book is about the recount, but it's not really about Franken or Coleman. Why?
I do describe the campaign in detail in Chapter 5, and attempt to describe the candidates. They were, of course, the central figures of the entire election. But This Is Not Florida is a tale of decisions made and not made by lawyers and political operatives. It is, more or less, a how-to for others who might face a recount. But it's a how-to filled with anecdotes and behind-the-scenes episodes.
Coleman's political story is somewhat widely known. Franken is still a political work in progress. This book is more about Franken's chief lawyer Marc Elias, his colleagues Kevin Hamilton and David Lillehaug, and Franken's campaign manager Stephanie Schriock. It's also about the Coleman decision-makers. Why they did -- and didn't -- take certain actions.
It’s also an inside look at the Franken organization and why and how it won the recount and election.
4. Some Republican activists and media outlets -- such as the Wall Street Journal -- stated during the recount and after that there was fraud in the election, that Franken and his lawyers stole the Senate seat. Do you agree?
Not at all. Not a bit. In fact, during the ultimate election contest trial when Coleman's legal team had the chance in court to prove fraud, to prove irregularities, they barely tried. Outside the courtroom, in media events, they tried to show mischief and inconsistencies among election officials statewide, but what happens in hallways outside of courts doesn't prove a thing. In the end, every ballot that was cast in the 2008 Senate election -- either via machine or absentee -- was examined by non-partisan election officials, and some ballots were examined twice and three times. Coleman's side had numerous chances to challenge ballots. They had an opportunity to block absentee ballots they didn't want entered in the count. They had a trial to introduce evidence of voters whose ballots were improperly rejected. They had four judges on the state Canvassing Board -- two Republicans -- and three judges on the trial court -- one appointed by a Republican governor, another by Jesse Ventura -- and five judges on the Minnesota Supreme Court -- three appointed by Republicans -- and all these judges came down on the side of finding that Franken won.
Fraud? Tell me where?
5. But how did the election flip, from Coleman ahead by 215 in November to Franken ahead by 312 in April?
First of all, election counts always change in the weeks after Election Day. Sometimes by thousands of votes, but no one ever pays attention when someone like Senator Amy Klobuchar wins by 300,000 votes. So, it is not uncommon for numbers to shift.
Secondly, Franken’s side did do a better job of analyzing hand-counted ballots and challenging Coleman ballots. Besides, Democrats are notoriously sloppy voters, so some ballots that were challenged by Coleman were, indeed, valid Franken votes; they needed closer looks by the Canvassing Board.
Finally, Franken’s absentee ballot chase turned into a gold mine.
People forget that Franken won the actual recount by 49 votes. Then, with the addition of wrongly rejected absentee ballots, his lead soared to 312.
6. What were some of the biggest surprises to you about the recount?
I write about them in the book. For one, I didn't know -- and I don't think it has previously been written -- how much the Barack Obama campaign distanced itself from the Franken campaign. If Obama would have shown up just once during the final days of the Senate campaign, I believe he would have pushed Franken over the top. But they shunned Franken.
The second surprise -- not to me, but others -- was the role of Supreme Court Chief Justice Eric Magnuson. The Franken side expected him to be in Coleman's camp. The Coleman side really expected him to rule in their favor. But he didn't. He impressed all sorts of folks with his balanced approach on the Canvassing Board. It really annoyed the Coleman camp.
Thirdly, I was surprised by the power of non-decisions made. A key one: when the Canvassing Board first ruled that improperly rejected absentee ballots shouldn't be included in the count, Franken lawyer Marc Elias had a choice to go to the state Supreme Court and challenge the board. He decided to cool his jets and see how it all played out. It was the best decision of the recount.
In the end, the board flipped on its attitude towards the absentees, and it forced Coleman to run the Supreme Court to block the count of more votes. That Coleman move came back to haunt him in many ways.
Holding one's fire sometimes is the most important act of all.
7. Besides that "non-decision," what other Franken team tactic was most impressive?
I think the recruitment of aggrieved voters by lawyer Charlie Nauen was critical to Franken's victory, numerically and judicially. Nauen was the lawyer Elias and Schriock hired to find voters whose ballots had been wrongly rejected. Nauen diligently got each of those voters to clearly explain what they did right and why it was wrong to have their votes rejected. Out of 61 voters Nauen worked with, 47 of their votes wound up counting. Remember, Franken only won by 312. Nauen got him 15 percent of that.
The Nauen exercise of proving each ballot was exactly what the three judge panel in the election contest and the Supreme Court wanted to see. Coleman's team never went in that direction. They never sought to prove with details, affidavits and testimony that many voters cast their votes for Senator Coleman.
8. What are the lessons that politicians and political operatives can take away from This Is Not Florida?
If you’re ahead, don’t assume you will stay ahead. Vote counts change. If you are behind, look under every rock, read every legal loophole, chase after every rejected ballot. Victory could be at hand.
And winning a recount isn’t only about who has the best lawyers. This is a political game. This is a public relations contest. A recount is won on many levels. In the end, it’s which candidate truly received the most votes. But sometimes votes are left on the table. Franken’s legal team made sure that didn’t happen, not at all. They learned from that other recount, the one in Florida in 2000. And this was not Florida.
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Jay Weiner Author of This Is Not Florida How Al Franken Won the Minnesota Senate Recount Publication date: October 2010
University of Minnesota Press $24.95 Hardcover ISBN 978-0-8166-7038-3 268 pages 6 X 9
Jay Weiner is a Twin Cities journalist who wrote about sports for 30 years before being asked by editors at startup MinnPost.com to “help out” on coverage of the Al Franken-Norm Coleman U.S. Senate recount.
That led to eight months of daily recount coverage for MinnPost by Weiner, reporting that earned him Minnesota’s top journalism prize, the 2009 Frank Premack Public Affairs Award for breaking news.
From 1980 to 2007, Weiner worked as a reporter for the Minneapolis Star Tribune specializing in off-the-field sports issues, mostly sports business matters, especially stadium finance debates. His first book, Stadium Games: Fifty Years of Big League Greed and Bush League Boondoggles, was published in 2000 by the University of Minnesota Press.
Weiner also has covered every Winter and Summer Olympics since 1984, most recently the 2008 Beijing Summer Games for Sports Business Journal, the national sports trade publication, and the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games as a research supervisor for NBC’s various networks.
Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Weiner attended Oberlin College and is a graduate of Temple University. He also has been a Policy Fellow at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. Married to William Mitchell College of Law Professor Ann Juergens, and the father of two sons, Henry and Nate, Weiner lives and works in St. Paul.
### For more information, please visit: www.ThisIsNotFlorida.com www.jayweiner.com
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THIS IS NOT FLORIDA: A COMPREHENSIVE TIMELINE
DAY 16 November 19, DAY 1 November 4, 2008: Nearly 2008: Recount begins. DAY 47 December 20, three million Minnesotans go to polls. Franken side devel- 2008: Elias announces Barack Obama wins 54 percent of ops detailed data the election results have the presidential vote. But in the to track progress flipped and final count Minnesota U.S. Senate race, Repub- of recount and will show it. “We believe lican incumbent Norm Coleman and fate of chal- firmly that margin will be Democratic-Farmer-Labor challenger lenged ballots between thirty-five and Al Franken each garner only 42 percent at 106 sites. fifty.” DAY 57 December 30, of votes, with Independence Party Coleman team 2008: Elias and Franken spoiler Dean Barkley grabbing is not as data trackers are off by 16 percent. Coleman obsessive one; State Canvass- leads by 215 votes, about data ing Board results show triggering auto- tracking. It will Franken wins recount by matic statewide come back to 49 votes. hand recount. haunt them. JAN DEC
DAY 61 DAY 5 November 8, 2008: DAY 37 January 3, 2009: In first skirmish, Coleman DAY 10 November 13, 2008: December 10, Counting of additional absen- lawyers charge that some In his initial public appearance 2008: If this tee ballots lifts Franken’s lead ballots from Minneapo- as Franken’s lead lawyer, Marc were Florida and DAY 45 December 18, 2008: to 225. lis that were alleg- Elias, operating on bad informa- the 2008 Bush- A vote for “Lizard People” DAY 63 January 5, 2009: edly riding around tion, talks about a non-existent Gore recount, it is evaluated by the Canvassing Board certifies in an election 84-year-old woman from Beltrami would be over. That state Canvassing Franken victory. official’s car are ? County whose absentee vote historic recount Board. It’s not ac- DAY 64 January 6, 2009: about to be counted went uncounted. It’s an auspi- lasted 36 days. cepted. Another Coleman, whose six-year in secret. Bloggers say cious debut for Elias, but signals The Minne- vote for “Flying Senate term has now expired, the ballots were in a trunk. the start of an absentee ballot sota saga is just Spaghetti Mon- files election contest petition. None of it is true, but the chase by the Franken campaign. warming up. ster” gets a look, Minnesota has one U.S. sena- recount battle is on. too. Things are tor. But for how long? turning wacky. FEB APR MAR
DAY 84 January 26, DAY 130 March 13, 2009: DAY 155 April 7, DAY 161 April 13, 2009: Three- 2009: Election contest Trial ends with Coleman’s 2009: Additional votes judge panel rules Franken is win- trial, in front of a three- lawyers repeatedly losing are counted. Franken ner of election and shoots down judge panel, begins. arguments and rulings. leads now by 312. all of Coleman’s legal arguments. Still, Coleman appeals. JUN JUL MAY
DAY 210 June 1, 2009: Min- DAY 239 June 30, 2009: State Supreme Court unanimously affirms DAY 246 July 7, 2009: Alan Stuart Franken, 58, is sworn in as Minnesota’s nesota Supreme Court hears trial court ruling. Franken wins. Coleman concedes. Governor Tim junior U.S. Senator. Top Democratic Party senators give thumbs-up to Franken arguments on Coleman appeal. Pawlenty and Secretary of State Mark Ritchie sign election certificate. lawyers from floor of Senate. Recount saga ends 246 days after it began.