Where we are: Sometime today, Team Coleman will file its reply brief, which is the last written document scheduled in the MN Supreme Court appeal. On June 1, the Supremes will hear oral arguments. Then they will rule, but there is no schedule for that. The fact that they will have all the briefs in hand for two weeks before oral arguments might mean they will have put themselves in a position to decide quickly after oral arguments, but no guarantees on that one. There is a state statute that requires the Supremes to give this matter priority over everything else on their docket.

When the Coleman brief hits today, I will be a little less obsessed than I have been with the latest version of their equal protection argument, and more interested in how they handle Franken's challenges on more earthly issues of ballots and evidence. By that I mean this:

Franken's brief suggested that the court could reject Coleman's case on a simple point: that Team Coleman failed to put enough ballots into evidence with minimal proof that they could be counted even under a loose standard.

The ThreeJudges who heard the Election Contest trial ruled that they had before them fewer than 700 previously-rejected ballots for which the registration of the voter was proved. Of those, TheThree ordered that 351 of them be counted, and they were, which caused Franken's lead to increase from 225 to its current level of 312.

If all that is correct, there are fewer than 350 ballots that were introduced into evidence with proof that the voter was registered that have not yet been counted. Maybe that's all there were. Or maybe Coleman's legal team blew it big-time by not putting ballots into evidence with at least that minimum proof of acceptability. All of those 350 or so ballots were rejected at least three times for some other flaw -- such as signature mismatch issues, problems with the addresses, evidence that the voter voted in person on Election Day, etc. Coleman's case suggests that the standards applied were too high, compared to standards applied elsewhere on Election Day.

Maybe the Supremes will agree that too strict a standard caused ballots to be rejected that should have been counted.
But it seems unlikely the high court will adopt a standard so low that unregistered Minnesotans will be allowed to have their votes counted. (I don't believe Coleman has ever suggested a standard that low.)

If so, it strains credulity to argue that Coleman can make up 312 ballots by counting fewer than 350 additional ballots (some of which will be for Dean Barkley).

The court could be in a position to decide that it doesn't need to even deal with Coleman's allegations that lack of uniform standards, combined with the "strict compliance" standard adopted by TheThreeJudges cost him the election. When the brief comes in, I will be looking hard to see whether Team C has an answer to this problem.