OK, the Minnesota Supreme Court has ruled, and it’s confusing.

The Hill says that the court has ruled with the Coleman campaign, and The New York Times says that the ruling favors the Franken campaign.

Both the stories have the same basic synopsis of the ruling (quoting the Times here):

The court ruled that the Coleman and Franken camps, working with the Minnesota secretary of state and the Canvassing Board, must agree on a standard to decide which absentee ballots should be counted. It was unclear precisely how the inevitable disputes between the campaigns would be resolved.

So, if this means that all 3 (4?) parties for each vote, it sounds like a firm “no count,” but if it means that all of them need to establish a standard to which they agree, then I am unclear how that goes, except that, perhaps it ends up before the court again, because I do not expect the Coleman camp to reasonable.

In either case, the process is supposed to be hammered out by December 31 at 4:00pm CDT, which means that the votes would probably be tabulated on January 2….I think.

A more complete, if less definitive description of what is a confusing ruling is available at the Minnesota Independent.

The sticking point to me is whether they have to agree on process or each ballot. The latter leads to the campaigns attempting to game the votes by objecting to votes in areas unfavorable to them.

The court did have strong words for either campaign being unreasonable, but I do not know to what degree this will mean anything.

In fact, there is a part of me that thinks that the Minnesota Supreme Court kicked the can down the road with its decision, and they expect to deal with challenges in January.

In any case, in terms of the actual vote counting, Franken’s challenges having been supported at about twice the rate of Coleman’s challenges, and the counting of his challenges just started, and the current count from the Strib has Coleman up by 5, but Franken winning by 89 based on the challenge percentages, and that is without any of the absentee votes in question being counted.