Franken Win Certified, but Senate Will Delay Seating

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Franken: Senate Victory 'Incredibly Humbling'

A Minnesota board on Monday certified results showing Democrat Al Franken winning the state's U.S. Senate recount over Republican Norm Coleman, whose lawyer promised a legal challenge that probably will keep the race in limbo for months.

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Earlier yesterday, the Minnesota Supreme Court issued a ruling that denied Coleman's efforts to count an additional 654 absentee ballots that had been rejected earlier, ending, for now, the incumbent's best chance of closing the gap with Franken.

The court -- in an opinion written by Justice Alan C. Page -- said that Coleman's attempt to include the rejected absentees did not meet the criteria for counting ballots laid out in a previous ruling, specifically that both sides had to be in agreement for any additional ballots to be counted.

"Because the parties and the respective counties have not agreed as to any of these additional ballots, the merits of this dispute (and any other disputes with respect to absentee ballots) are the proper subject of an election contest," Page wrote.

Trimble, in outlining the reasons for Coleman's planned election challenge, cited the "utter lack of uniformity" in deciding whether to include wrongly rejected absentee ballots in the final vote count as the "most troublesome aspect of the recount."

Among the other issues likely to be included in the Coleman election contest are the alleged double-counting of 150 votes, and the 133 votes that were included in the final total even though they disappeared from a Minneapolis church between election night and the recount.

Staff writers Perry Bacon Jr. and Paul Kane contributed to this report.