Making Norm Coleman Pay, One Dollar At A Time

Norm Coleman finally got around to filing his appeal of the three-judge panel's ruling that Al Franken won the Minnesota Senate election by 312 votes. It's funny that he and his lawyers stated their intention to appeal for months, and only got around to it seven days after the ruling. Why, it's as if they were intentionally dragging their feet to delay the seating of Senator Franken!

The filing is here. And I liked this question from the Minnesota press:

St. Paul Pioneer Press reporter Jason Hoppin asked what made Coleman think the ballots he wants opened and counted would break his way, when batches of ballots opened during the recount and the election contest trial favored Franken.

After commenting that “you guys like asking this question don’t you, Jason?” Ginsberg said absentee ballots opened since the election have been more from precincts that favored Franken than Coleman. The ballots Coleman wants counted come from precincts that favored him, Ginsberg claimed.

Except Franken has consistently won absentee ballots regardless of the district.

To this point, the protracted court battle has worked out pretty good for Norm Coleman and the Republicans. For a relatively low price, Coleman has denied Democrats a 59th seat in the Senate, with little additional consequence. Until now. This is an ingenious idea from Adam Green.

Recently, I critiqued the DSCC's "petition" asking Norm Coleman to get out -- saying there was no "theory of change" about why people taking that action would have any impact.

To be constructive, I gave a free piece of advice to the DSCC on how to organize people strategically: ask people to give $1/day until Norm goes away. If Republicans in DC saw the DSCC's warchest growing by the day, their incentives would reverse -- instead of telling Norm to keep going, they'd tell him to get lost.

The DSCC didn't take that advice. But Howard Dean's Democracy for America was all about it, and partnered with the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (which I co-founded) to make it happen at NormDollar.com. Instead of raising money to help generic Democrats, we're raising it to support bold progressives in 2010.

Since Saturday, over $20,000 has been raised -- prompting news coverage in the New York Times, ABC, Politico, Huffington Post, and great support at Digby's blog, MyDD, CrooksandLiars, FDL, Senate Guru, The Seminal, The MN Progressive Project, and other blogs.

I'm sold. And you should join the NormDollar.com campaign as well. Even if Coleman continues to delay the result of the election, at least progressive candidates will get richer in the exchange.