Strib linked to the Court's opinion, here. Per this excerpt, Strib reported:
The Minnesota Supreme Court said improperly rejected absentee ballots must be counted by the state Canvassing Board, something Coleman tried to prevent. But they won't be counted immediately, and Coleman and Franken must agree on which ones are tallied.
The court ruled against Coleman's attempt to block the Canvassing Board from counting any improperly rejected absentee ballots, but said such ballots can be counted only when both campaigns and local officials agree they have been improperly excluded.
In doing so, it ordered the campaigns of Coleman and Franken, along with Secretary of State Mark Ritchie and local canvassing boards, to establish a process for jointly identifying mistakenly rejected absentee ballots. The court said they should then be added to the tally.
[...] the requirement that candidates agree on which absentee ballots were improperly rejected could throw a new curve ball into the process and even prevent legitimate votes from being counted.
"The order does not guarantee that the candidates and their political parties will agree on any rejected ballot," said Associate Justice Alan Page in a stinging dissent. "Instead, the court's order will arbitrarily disqualify enfranchised voters on the whim of the candidates and political parties."
David Schultz, a Hamline University professor specializing in election law, agreed.
"This is really out of character with Minnesota law to now suddenly give campaigns a veto over the counting," he said, calling it a "weird proviso that basically says everybody has to make nice and cooperate on this one."
Schultz said Coleman is more vulnerable to rejected absentee ballots from St. Louis County and elsewhere where Franken did well in the election. Officials in Hennepin County have tallied 336 absentee ballots that they agreed were improperly rejected.
The court opinion, signed by Associate Justice Helen Meyer, said that county canvassing boards lack authority under state law to count improperly rejected absentee ballots, but that correcting the error should not have to wait for court action, as the Coleman campaign contended.
Meyer ordered the counties and candidates to report accepted absentee ballots to the state Canvassing Board by Dec. 31.
She instructed local officials and candidates to agree on which improperly rejected ballots should be reported to the board.
Meyer said the Canvassing Board cannot certify the final results of the recount until it gets the tally of absentee ballots acceptable to the parties, or a statement that they did not reach agreement.
She warned lawyers for the campaigns against bringing frivolous objections to counting improperly rejected ballots.
Associate Justice Paul Anderson, like Page, also dissented over the decision to enjoin county canvassing boards from correcting errors without the consent of the candidates.
He cited the case of two people who were rejected for lack of registration when in fact both were registered.
"I am perplexed by [the Coleman campaign's] position that county canvassing boards do not have the ability to review and correct obvious errors in the counting and recording of absentee ballots," Anderson wrote.
While the reporting jumped between nose-count news, and the impact of the opinion, it did highlight dissent views in the decision. If a precedent on absentee counting conventions and nuances is to be established, it cannot be a two-party fest when there is a viable third Minnesota party now, and perhaps more parties for our future.
Give the IP a seat on the canvassing board, or some other say equal to the DFL and GOP, on how votes are to be fairly processed, or else keep ALL parties out of it.
But do NOT further favor two-party political dominance by strengthening that dominance solely because each of the two has a stake in the present dispute; while we all have a stake in vote handling in the future.
________UPDATE_________
I am disappointed that none of the dissenting opinions specifically introduced this aspect of fairness into Court thinking. It seemed a point inherent but unstated in Justice Page's dissent, where he wrote in part [bracketed text added for explanatory purposes, though not in the original]:
Josef Stalin is alleged to have once said, "I consider it completely unimportant who ... will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this - who will count the votes, and how."
Today the court gives credence to that proposition by preventing at least some number of validly cast votes from being included in the final canvass of the election for Minnesota's United States Senate seat currently held by Senator Norm Coleman. As a result, these Minnesota citizens who cast their votes for Senator Coleman and Al Franken, as well as in other election contests on the ballot, will be disenfranchised.
[...] But "foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," and therein lies the rub. The court's ruling denies county canvassing boards which have reached the decision - that an absentee ballot was rejected in obvious error - the ability to correct those errors unless the [two-party] candidates agree. The court's order may seek the peaceful [two party] way out by asking the [contesting] campaigns to agree on improperly rejected ballots. But the order does not guarantee that the candidates and their political parties will agree on any rejected ballot. Instead, the court's order will arbitrarily disqualify enfranchised voters on the whim of the [two contesting] candidates and [the two dominant] political parties without the benefit of the legislatively authorized procedures in section 204C.39.
It is a perverse result, indeed, for [two of the State's three] political parties and their candidates to determine whether a voter's absentee ballot was properly or improperly rejected [... and] the court has abdicated its role as the defender of the fundamental right to vote. Instead it has made the [two dominant] candidates and their parties the gatekeepers- even though they are likely to be more concerned with their own election prospects than with protecting the absentee voter's right to vote.
Justice Page was most vexed over unfairness to a set of voters, the absentees, and to each one of them; but while he did not directly look beyond that to unfairness to the third party, his preeminent focus upon fairness, however, implicitly includes attention to being fair to the third party and its members and those who might in the future support and vote for it. This court consideration does not only impact the present two-party dispute, it impacts more.