They lost their effort to get a statistician to testify about rejected absentee ballots. In fact, they lost so big the three-judge panel said the issue of comparing different counties’ ballot treatments is “irrelevant.”

Still, Norm Coleman’s legal team came out swinging again today on the issue of how different jurisdictions handled similar absentee ballots.

The assertion: “Illegal” ballots already have been counted.

The concept: When the three-judge panel of Elizabeth Hayden, Kurt Marben and Denise Reilly swept aside 13 ballot categories in their “Friday the 13th” ruling, they ignored the fact that some counted ballots would have fallen into at least one of the now out-of-bounds categories.

This afternoon -- after a relatively speedy day of testimony, mostly from local elections officials -- Coleman lawyer Ben Ginsberg distributed to journalists detailed spreadsheets that show that counties handles absentee ballots differently.

Some checked to see if witnesses were registered voters; others didn’t.

For instance, as was testified to earlier this week, Carver County rejected 181 ballots for which the voter’s witness wasn’t a registered voter. That was nearly 36 percent of all rejected absentee ballots in that Coleman-leaning county. That’s what the three-judge panel said was the right way to reject ballots.

But Franken-leaning Minneapolis, in Hennepin County, rejected no ballots for that reason. Indeed, according to Coleman’s statistics, only 22 counties checked for witnesses’ voter registration.

Thus, it could be that some accepted absentee ballots were witnessed in some counties by unregistered voters. Under the judges’ “Friday the 13th” ruling, Ginsberg said, that’s a no-no.

“Illegal votes are included in the current counts that the court will have to certify as accurate,” Ginsberg said today, as he did Wednesday.

For his part, Franken lawyer Marc Elias pointed to the court’s ruling that blocked testimony from economist/statistician King Banaian. It called it another “data point” on a developing graph that shows where the judges stand on the so-called “equal protection” matter.

That’s the issue Ginsberg is pushing hard these days.

“I think we may have seen the last of the dots be connected” on the judges’ views on Coleman’s Bush v. Gore argument, Elias said, suggesting Ginsberg is barking up a very dead tree.