rossi is also a candidate this year. you know, i believe that the lawyers and the campaign

managers and the data collectors from any race that's too close to call this year can learn much from what did and did not happen here during what's the longest, largest and most expensive recount in american history, namely the al franken-norm 35 weeks, 2.9 million votes, $20 million spent on the recount alone. another $40 million on the campaign. so a total of $60 million to become the 60th senator. you know, it's often been casually said and as i've been doing these book promotional tours, everyone always asks, wasn't franken outlawyered. that's the way the people talk about him and did have a band of barristers is what i call them. and coleman had his cone gaggle of lawyers, most of whom were

minoso based, except for the well known election law, expert ben ginsburg, who served as coleman's spokesman during the contest and he of course had been george bush's main spokesperson during the 2002 of 2000 three recount -- during the 2000 recount. that was a victory forgives berg. but to broadly contribute the ginsburg victory to mere lawyering negates other factors in his win. one was early and overall preparing for it. two was data legislation and analysis of the data that he collected. three was fund raising and four was rapid response to events that occurred. "the new yorker" had a grief review of my -- brief review of my book and they wrote that the seed that wanted it more won and that was the similarity between the minnesota recount and the florida recount, but i also think there were other forces out there. one was the spied that wanted it more had lost eight years

earlier in florida and was trying to get back at that and also the memory of paul wellstone was around this recount as well. senator coleman had beaten wellstone in an election, franken's political inspiration was paul wellstone, so there was a lot happening that drove the recount. while this is not florida, that's the family of the book, that's an inside fly on the wall look at the recount with a particular emphasis on how franken's team performed, if does detail a template for how the future recounts-could be ducked -- will be conducted. but that's all in the context of wide election laws from state to state so even though we here in minnesota live through our recount and thought it was tedious and complicated and had all these players and lasted all these weeks. there are different recount laws in every state, so as we get our

crystal ball pout and see where the recounts are going to happen, don't think that what occurred in minnesota will be recreated elsewhere. for instance, nevada is now a battleground. harry reid, challenger sharon opening he will, there's no -- engel, there's no mandatory recount there. the loser has to seek the recount and he or she has to deicide to pay for it and if they win, the state comes in and pays for it. so there isn't like ours, half of one percent and it's instant and no matter what the triggering method, the modern recount is a sort of campaign in overtime, in extra innings and it operates on these levels of legal, technological, political, p.p., fund raising and even a certain amount of social networking. it seems like only yesterday that it was 2008, but the twitter world was not really that robust in 2008. youtube was, and you know, franken's team used youtube

effectively to find and to use absentee ballots, people to cast absentee ballots in order to show that their vote didn't count and it was a sympathetic youtube video. coleman's team used the web to see if their voters' votes had been rejected. fortunately we have a new system from the secretary of state's office so all of us can check that at a neutral site but even back in 2008, technology was used and you can be sure that any recount this year will have super duper amounts of technology to find voters and for voters to see where they stand. so all of those easements that i just -- elements that i just mentioned, i would like to talk about each of those by describing how franken won the vote out of 2.9 million cast and in that i want to talk about some moments of truth for me, either during the recount period from november 2008 to july 2009, or the back reporting that i did subsequent to franken's swearing

in. there were moments of truth when i realized that the franken forces were generally on top of their game and the coleman side was frequent my not. i spoke to about 40 players in the precount after franken was sworn in. after all the key players, everyone spoke to me except senator coleman and ben ginsburg. so lawyers on both sides did, campaign managers on both sides did, commit of political operatives on both sides did, so i feel that i tried my best to be fair and balanced, and by the way, between november 2008 and july 2009, i was probably at just about every news conference, i missed two or three days of the canvassing board which is this administrative board they had and i missed one day of the trial, so i should get some battle pay of some sort, so let's start with the preparation and the motivation. it's back in the summer of 2008 and franken's campaign really going sideways a little bit for allegations of he didn't pay his taxes, which wasn't really

totally true, the digging up of old drug and former drug use and senator coleman's drug use and the general kind of disarray it felt around his campaign and he had not won the endorsement yet from the dfl, the democratic party here. stephanie was brought in to be his campaign manager and right the ship and she is not a secret person, because i write about her a lot, but a lot of people don't realize the impact that she had on this campaign to turn things around and pretty much by then, by the summer of 2008, mark elias had been engaged by the franken campaign. not necessarily for the the recount, but yesterday been franken's lawyer. elias is the lawyer for almost all the senate candidates. and his firm has a political arm in washington represented the democrats in a trail committee and barack obama. elias' mentor, bob bauer, is now

the would you say counsel and one of the young lawyers who worked on the recount. these people are well connected. and by early october, he had hired dave slowhog, to nail down a full throated recount. that was done by october 12, october 15, we had three full weeks, but we're not just talking about thinking about it, we're talking about a plan and in the first hours of election night and these are in the wee hours, there was a conference call when it became clear there was going to be a recount. kevin hamilton, who is seattle based in the same law firm, he got on the phone and he told everybody study absentee ballots, look at absentee ballots, people always screw up, particularly democrats, they're really sloppy voters and kevin with morning on the rossi recount in 2004 where absentee ballots were an issue. the other thing about hamilton, from the moment he landed in minneapolis, which would have been like the 11th of november, he was thinking about a trial.

he's a trial attorney. and just keep that in mind when you realize that the coleman legal team, and its lead trial lawyer wasn't hired until about three days before the first scheduling meeting on that trial in january. and that was joe freedburg, a great trial lawyer in town, well known, nice man, but wouldn't have known an election law if he tripped over it in january and suddenly, he had to represent senator coleman, against hamilton, who had experience and was planning for two months for this thing. also on these calls, was a man named chris sauter, who to me is an unknown person and someone i like and he is arguably the most experienced and well trained trainer of volunteers at recounts and he's a recount technician. in the book, i call him the carney of recount people because he goes from state fair to state fair, recount to recount and he doesn't operate the first wheel, but he operates the recount. so that team was in place early on, and they brought about 30

recounts, 30 statewide recounts in their ammo. it remains unclear to me still exactly how closely ben ginsburg was involved in the precount early on. people tell me that he was on call. i know that he came here to the twin cities. soon afterwards,ality least one. but in the early stages, it became clear that the coleman side believed that local lawyers should do it for p.r. reasons and they felt comfortable and also senator coleman felt that he was going to win and i think that's one of the flaws that people who are going to face a recount next week or two weeks should deal with, if you're ahead, do not assume you're going to win. these things flip, they don't flip offer. some people think four or five times in the last 25 years have statewide recounts flipped in the united states, but it can happen, particularly with 215 votes. and senator coleman's lawyers, had never been involved in a

statewide recount. they had done other recounts, but not statewide. tony trimble, again, a very nice fellow, graduate of william mitchell college of law, jan is here, he's the dean, and he told me in this back reporting to prepare for the franken coleman recount. he dusted off his files, those are his words, from the the u.s. house recount of menge and kennedy of 2000. that was a recount that drew very little attention and very little firepower from either political parties because it happened in 2000 and florida was underway, and the nation's eyes were there and all the big hitters, including souter and ginsburg were in florida. it also did not have any of the machinery that our senatewide recount had like a canvassing board. it wasn't as close as the senate one. so you get the early picture. not only was the franken team

staffed up and engaged, but there was the spirit, the bitter taste of florida, a bitter revenge, the democrats wanted to come in here, he was of the 60th seat, he was al franken and the wellstone spirit is hanging over that thing as norm coleman is the spirit of that one. we move on to the phase of the technology and attention to detail that helps the franken recount effort and there is where souter come in, the recount veteran. he wrote the book, the recount primer, he wrote it with some other guys and it lays out for the democrats or for anyone who gets a hold of it how to do a recount and chris is very committed to this notion of the call at the table, and when i talk about the call at the table, i'm talking about regular votes, this is before absentee ballots come into, these are the votes that come into the voting machines and we have the hand precount, regular ballots are counted by hand, all 2.9 million of them. and if you recall, it was crazy, it started on november 19th, 110 locations, 87 counties,

4,130 precincts, nutty. so after election night, coleman is ahead by about 700 or so, but when the dust settles and late precincts come in and mappers are corrected and the normal organic shaking out of votes occurs and happens in every election, we just don't know about it, he's up by 215 when the recount starts. and elias, through chris souter, through this carney of precounts, -- recounts, tells volunteers and they have thousands of volunteers, to make sure you record the call at the table. what do i mean by the call at the table? this is the back of the book and i know you can't really see it, but these are ballots here amped and -- and some ballots people will write in i want him anyway. and then we have the lizard people vote, then we've got brett favre and the flying

spaghetti monsters and all of those people. so when you -- when the votes are recounted, there are volunteers at the table and they can challenge these votes about voter intent saying it doesn't look like it's for coleman, it doesn't look like it's for franken. ultimately, all this voter intent stuff is determined by the state canvassing board down the road and it would be in this case too, to supreme court justices, to district court justices, secretary of state, but in the trenches, it's the two parties that challenge the ballots, local officials, average hard working, well-meaning people, saying i think the vote was for coleman, no, i think it was for franken and the franken side had this theory based on souter's experience that the call at the table was by experienced election officials are generally correct. there's no reason to disbelieve that when mrs. jones or mr. smith says no, i'm sorry, that intent was for coleman, that they're making it up or they're cheating or anything. they're just good, honest, hard

working, minnesota officials. it's kind of like the nfl is what mark elias says, you need indisputable evidence to overturn a challenge and in most cases, just keep track of what's going on at the table. so with that in mind, are the franken team set up these virtual offices really that went out to every counting praise, 106 sites and they employed what they call a pony express to get all their data back to st. paul as early as possible. the lawyers said why don't we get the ballots, scan them in, send them over pdf and we'll do is and peterson was in elias' office and said there's no broadband in this county, we just can't just shoot up 2.9 million votes. thus, the pony express came about and i won't read it, but there was a guy in the franken

campaign named trice, dusty trice and he was enlisted to assemble the 106 self-contained mini offices in white cardboard bankers offices. each set of boxes had a laptop, a cell modem, two staplers, five clip boards, each of them with template sheets that chris souter had devised that they could record every voters' move. trice told me we went to 15 office max's and bought every clip board in the city. and trice's team assembled more than 300 boxes, they filled three 12 by 12 offices, rose 6 feet high, they were placed in trucks which were rented and they were distributed in these voting places or these counting places, and souter said he had never seen a recount that well done and he told that to franken and franken, whenever he made fund raising calls told steven spielberg and barbara streisand

and all those people, were really well organized. so that was the foundation of finding out where they stood on day-to-day and the importance of that is really, you know, as they say, if you don't know where you stand, you don't know where you're going and if you didn't know that you were kind of catching up a little bit, you might have other strategies. they were already working on a side strategy of the absentee ballots. early on, they sort of didn't keep track of the call at the table. some other people weren't told to keep track of the calls at the table. they had a feel but they didn't have an exact idea approval rating in the book, you'll see that different key players thought they were ahead, they were hyped, he didn't know. the campaign manager and two lawyers had three different views as to where they stood. then all these ballots would return to st. paul on the dusty trice pony express and that's when they would be pdf'd, tagged by technology calmics people and you wouldn't know if they were votes that were crossed off or weren't crossed off and said

lizard people or didn't so when the canvassing board came about, the franken team could keep a consistent notion of what votes were being challenged and accepted and if the canvassing board would forget, they could point it out and in the end, the chief just kept his own cheat sheet and he did a good job on his own. what they were find something when you're find by 215 and there's 2.9 million votes, it's not that hard for the thing to swing. if you think about, 2 1/2 votes a county. it really isn't that hard and votes do come about. now, of course, senator coleman mr. find votes too. early i don't know -- early on, they lost votes, because dean barkley, the third candidate had gotten more votes. but the irony is the attention to deal got the franken people crazy because the secretary of state and the news media was not keeping talk of it in the same way and what the secretary of state's office was doing and we in the news media was picking up was the challenged ballots, not

the counted ballots and if you take the challenged ballots out of the count, you don't really know where the count stands and if the coleman team is challenging more ballots than the franken team, it might mean that franken is picking up less votes. in the end, they both challenged too many and it got out of hand. in any event, there was a discrepancy between what the franken team began to feel what they knew happened what was being sorted out in the news media, which led to a story in the star tribune, my former employer, in the last weekend of november, that said with a hug honking chart that seemed to be official that franken couldn't win. it was impossible for him to win. and this chart, you know those charts you have on a map that says how far you are from indianapolis or kansas city and you have to try to read it. that's the way the chart was. i couldn't figure it out. well, the problem was that there were these dueling news conferences between mark elias and fritz knopf of the coleman

team and they were trying to score points in washington and trying to do fund praising and mark had great connections to the washington bloggers, fritz did not. and the other problem was the obama administration was forming, there was a lot of excitement, the economy was really in the tank, rich people are already given their money to these candidates. there was a lot of campaign fatigue. franken was on the phone for six hours a day trying to raise money. that was his full-time job and now the state's largest newspaper was saying he can't win. so the franken people went bonkers, because they just thought nobody is going to give us money if they're going to lose and they were getting calls from the big hitters in washington like chuck schumer and harry reid saying hey, we should just pull the plug here guys. this forced elias to begin revealing what he wanted to keep close to the vest which is that they were catching up. he really didn't want it tell people that and this created one of the memorable moments for me of the recount and it was a

snowy saturday, we're now late into the recount. it's december and the canvassing board has begun to meet and the absentee ballots issue has started to get heated up. and it was like one of those mary tyler moore opening shows where it's snowing and snowing sideways and the windows are all frosted and only two reporters showed up. rachel, who has been with the pioneer press and i were there, we both lived near the headquarters abandon elias and the press secretary were proud as could be that they were having a news conference on saturday, during a blizzard, four or five days before christmas. i don't know why they felt that way and elias who is a great funny character of a guy, whose knee is always moving and jingles coins in his pocket and a superstitious big guy who moves his arms around all the time, he said we're down by 2, up by 4, down by 24 and we said this guy is nutty, he said al

franken will have more votes than norm coleman when the casting board meets next week. we believe firmly that margin-between 35 and 50. at some point, not long after that, al franken will stand before you as the senator elect from minnesota. so he declared that on december 20 and i'm sure that rachel and i just shook our heads. there was a conference call, but i don't think anybody was on the conference call. i don't even know if the star tribune covered that and he was so filled with confidence, he was just smug about it, and you know, this was the culmination of the hiring early on, of chris souter's rules, of the technology being done, of the penn express. they now -- pony express, they now felt that they were ahead 35-50. three days late, the canvassing board met and he was up by 36 and then a couple more cleaning house happened and he was up by 49 and elias joked then that he was glad it wasn't 51, because people wouldn't have trusted his

numbers. but for me, it was a real moment of truth that i should listen to mark elias because he mean right and the coleman team said we don't know where the numbers are coming from and that was another revelation really to the franken side that the coleman team really didn't know where the numbers were coming from and that gave them a boost. and then the absentee ballots issue heated up, and i think we saw another key moment, at least for me as a minnesotan and really one of the big surprises of the recount, it had to do with fairness, an there were two guys who i think, two men who stood for that during this recount and one was chief justice magnusson and the other was richie. magnusson had been appointed by tim pawlenty, he was pawlenty's friend supposed my and law

partner, republican, chef justice, and in the end, he sided with franken's effort to get the wrongly rejected absentee ballots in the count. it was something that turned the republicans in the state live i had, because they thought that eric magnusson would side with them. the outside lawyers from both teams thought this would be just like the east coast or the west coast, that the minnesota courts, because they're appointed by tim pawlenty, would be republican, that mark richie, because he was arguably the most left wing elected official in the state would be for the democrats, and then they would slug that out, that laurie swanson, attorney general, would be it way or that way. it didn't turn out that way pat all really and in fact, democrats started disliking mark richie, because they thought he was bending over backwards for the republicans and the republicans are saying what are you doing, you're letting this guy have more votes, we need to shut this baby down and in the end, there's talk now since richie is running for secretary of state that he sort of swung

the eplex somehow. they looked -- election somehow. they looked at the canvassing board and administrative board before the trial they looked at 1500 challenged ballots and the board split 3-2 on 14 of the 1500. and richie sided with the left leaning judges seven times and with the right leaning judges seven times. mark richie told me whoever the supreme court justice voted, he voted, because he was keeping track of the votes. he said whatever he says is fine with me. so they agreed 96% of the time, these five people who are very different, appointed by different people, or elected and in some ways, i think these -- one of the big are surprises for minnesotans, these people did the straight and narrow. let me tell you about another surprise that i'm sure wasn't written about before the book and that is the role of the obama campaign in the franken campaign and the role was, they didn't have any and one reason

why people think, you know, franken lost. that first time around or franken didn't get the margin that he should have. he certainly lost from the amount of votes that barack obama did by 12 percentage points. obama wins the state by 54% and franken by 42% and that is a huge, huge gap. maybe it was franken's baggage that he brought in and maybe it was obama's understanding that he was going to win the state. people who know say that if obama would have spent an hour at the twin cities airport on the sunday or upon before the election or gone to duluth in particular, they sent hillary clinton there instead on the monday before the election, that would have created 2,000 votes. it probably would have created 2,000 votes and we probably wouldn't n here today. that's really all you needed. but if didn't happen. in fact, jeff, who is the campaign professional, paul

wellstone's campaign manager, was obama's state campaign manager and he was really, really disturbed that they didn't allow any literature that had franken and obama on the same piece of paper, so jeff went a little rogue at the end and created one of those door hanging signs that you get in the last couple days of the election and it had both faces on that and the chicago people never saw it. but it was really -- it hurt. it hurt. and turnout was less, because there was and -- -- inanities passion that obama was going to win. jeff was zincing 80% and those two percentage points, probably up in the range and the 8th 8th congressional district would have made the difference. however, obama's impact was felt and that was throughout the absentee ballots. there was a tremendous absentee ballot on the part of the obama campaign and we did have the largest absentee ballot numbers in history, 293,000 absentee ballots, so about 10% of our voting was that.

and that created all the problem with what's a good absentee ballot and what isn't, if people have questions about how things have changed this election, i can answer them afterward, but things have changed for the better to undo some of the miss taxi and some of the controversies of 2008, but i want to fast forward and i want to fast forward to the trial, because it took so much time, even though i think in the end it wasn't all that important, because franken already won canvassing board and the trial was an effort by franken to catch up. if you recall, he started the trial up by 225 but he ended the trial -- excuse me, coleman started the trial behind by 225, when it's over, he's behind by 312, so this trial that was his idea winds up costing him 87 votes because of franken's effort to get votes. and again, franken's team was more prepared, more data centric, they had kept track of

absentee ballot voters and of course, there's a lot of stake. he was going to be now the 60th senator. there would be filibuster proof, the health care matter was coming up as were other things and there was a lot at stake for both sides and this leads to the most dramatic to he me and eerie and touching exchange of the whole recount, but it also shows the extent to which the franken side was willing to go to get a vote and it involves kevin hamilton, who is his lawyer from seattle, examining joe manski, who is the election official from program single payer county, and -- from ramsey county. i'm going to read some of this because it's like a per bring and mason law and order. exhibit f lived in a category by it's s. the exhibit was the absentee ballot of donald p. simmons cast on october 29, six days before the election. in as polite but lawyerly a way

as could, hamilton conducted a money know tone examination of manski. mr. simmons properly completed the absentee ballot application form,. yes and properly pleat completed the absentee ballot outside envelope. yes. mr. simmons was a properly registered voter at the time he registered the ballot, was he not. manski paused, looked at his papers. ramsey said do you know if he was a properly registered voter. manski said i don't know that. the reason i say that, i looked up the voter record, he has dezested status. what we don't know since this was printed out recently, if he was eligible on election day. so they don't know whether or not donald simmons was alive on election day. what do we need to figure out, hamilton asked manski.

as long as you're alive at some time on election day, your ballot should count. this is not chicago. and manski says yes, that's what we need to figure out. and hamilton repeats, so we need to figure out the time or date of his death? yes. so that exchange is over, hamilton moves on to the next exhibit, but members of the franken staff are watching of the trial on the uptick, the c-span of the -- i call it the psychedelic c-span in book, but it's computerized tv channel here, and they quickly run over to -- from dfl headquarters to department of health in st. paul, look for donald simmons death certificate and lunchtime, we're back in court. manski is back on the stand, and hamilton offers exhibit f3007 in to evidence and its simmons just acquired death certificate and

hamilton shows it to manski. done amend simmons was 65, an african-american guy, he had liver cancer, he camp to minnesota to get a transplant. his children were here, he really wanted to vote for obama. he loved jazz, his wife is a nice person, they moved from springfield, massachusetts, to be near their kid. the franken team in the absentee ballot hunt had found his name, sent a subpoena to him and mrs. simmons said he's dead. they still pursued it, the franken team. mr. manski, is this the same individual we were discussing before the break. that is correct, manski says. can you read the name and date of death of this voter? the person's name is donald peter simmons, the date of death was november 27, 2008, manski said. so he was alive on election day, hamilton says, his vote should counts and manski says yes and then three weeks later, when the

judges did couldn't all the absentee ballots, donald simmons' vote was counted. he was one of the 312. so it's pretty -- that's what organization is and determination. most of you know i'm not a political pundit but a recovering sports writer and i stumbled into the story, i had no idea about elections or recounts, but like sports, there are personalities in recounts and that was sort of why i felt -- it felt like i was back in the sports world. a lot of guys, that's for sure, and there were errors, there are a lot of errors and there were big plays, the hamilton-simmons moment was a big play. there were counts at the table. but this really wasn't a game. you know, and this was not for trophy. and for minnesota, it was really about statewide identity, i think, because we are a state that worries about how people think about us and how we do and we have this inferior complex,

you know, of how we're doing compared to the rest of the world, which leads to the title, which is called "this is not florida" and it grew from an exchange between robert magnusson, supreme court justice and "the new yorker" said we have a lot of andersons here in minnesota, we do. there are two major andersons and two major magnussons in this book and it drove me crazy. magnusson is a very respected lawyer in town, bowtied kind of guy, i actually met him when he prepped the twins, when he tried to get out of their lease at the dome in the 1990's, so i knew him in that realm as well and he had been one of george bush's lawyers in florida and he actually won the bush case before the florida senate that spun into the area where the u.s. supreme court could shut the recount down, and roger kind of swaggered up to the lectern before the minnesota state supreme court on an issue of whether to stop the absentee

ballots from being counted or not. that was the basic issue and that's what he wanted and what senator coleman wanted to have done in late -- december, and you could feel the judges kind of move up in their seats, because he's respected and they thought, this is going to be a pretty good show here, and he said, may it please the court, on december 12th, the state canvassing board with the best of intentions accepted an invitation, we believe, to go to florida and as tempting as that invitation is, given the weather outside the courtroom today, and then he was interrupted by paul anderson, and justice and son had promised himself that he wouldn't ask any questions without five minutes. if you know justice anson, that's very hard for him to do and it took him about 307 seconds and he was really mad and he said, counsel, i know you've been to florida, this is not florida. and i'm just not terrible live receptive to you telling us we're going to florida and we're comparing no that. this is minnesota, we have a case in minnesota and argue the

case in minnesota. that really set the tone for the rest of the recount. this is only only december, and it established the fact that we were going to do it, you know, on our own. so i think any candidate who faces a recount this election cycle should think about preparation. should think about data, should think about that rapid response, should think about the i'do singcracies of the state that he or they is in and if you add it all up, it might lead to victory, but you do need the votes, and they're there, or they're not. so thanks for coming. [applause] any questions? >> i have a questions. i understand why franken won the recount. ibut i'm kind of curious why you think he won the election, because you mentioned two

things, rumors of drug use, not paying taxes, which was true, his sexist writings, which ultimately led annie clovuture and mccullum not to endorse him, betty held off for quite a long time and then the charges of carpet bagging, that he had not lived in minnesota for 30 years and came back here, established residency, no elected office experience, but yet he was able to be someone who by all means had been a pretty good senator, been a very good mayor of st. paul, was it because he was identified with bush, is that why you think -- because those are some pretty big garbage he had to overcome there. >> sure. well, first of all, it was 42-42-16, so it was close. 2nd leadership, the recount -- secondly, the recount is the election and if you win the recount, you have won the election. it's the shaking out of the

votes. there's no doubt that -- i think i write in chapter 5 here that franken was a tough candidate and a democrat. in 2008 against a bush aligned republican senator, who had voted for the bailout and if you remember, the polls changed dramatically when coleman voted for the bailout, the bank bailout. it changed from coleman being ahead to franken being ahead. i think it was october 15th. that hurt coleman, even though in retrospect, some people think it might have been the right vote and the other thing that really shook out the campaign that no one can figure out was the final weekend when there were the allegations about senator coleman's wife getting money from an insurance company and then coleman having a last-minute commercial blaming franken for that and franken having an unprecedented sunday night tv commercial before the tuesday, saying it wasn't me, get out of here, norm coleman is lying to you. so i think to answer your question, i think he won the

election. and the recount. i think that you're right, it was super close, and i think that this -- the obama turnout, even though it wasn't as good as it should have been, helped franken a lot too, so i don't know if that answers it, but you know, i think that the fact that coleman as an incumbent can only get 42% doesn't say a lot about his present either. barkley got 16%, which is, you know, what's of the difference. >> i think we're on to something, because in the campaign, he constantly identified coleman with bsh. and now what's happening across the country, in a lot of these elections, they are identifying obama with a particular candidate that's running, and as a matter of fact, a lot of these candidates said they don't want anything to do with obama, they don't want him campaigning for him or anything. does the president have that much influence? >> ask harry reid, you know. i think so.

>> whatever became -- or what is the story about those phantom votes that were in somebody's trunk in minneapolis and then ended up in a warehouse? were they ever real? >> well, the so-called 32 in the trunk of cindy reichert. they weren't. i write about that here. they were votes and let me recall, since i've written this a while ago, but they were votes that were discovered in a precinct, they were totally under control in the right custody. cindy reichert used to be the hennepin county or minnesota eplex official, called the coleman offices on the friday night after the election and said we want to count these on start, because the canvass, the actual counting by each election unit has to be done quickly.

the coleman people get suspicious, they seek a hearing the neck morning before the judge, who winds up being on the canvassing board and in the end, fritz tells me that they -- they never said it was in the triangle. it was some bloggers who afterwards said it had been in the trunk and then tim pawlenty went on fox news and said it was in a trunk about three or four days after david bauer said it wasn't true. so those ballots, that was not true and the franken people called that i think the saturday morning ambush, i forget what it's called, the sneak attack, but it really got -- it hurt the coleman side, because it got the franken time to realize, these guys are going to be on their toes, going after us at any moment and it really was a wakeup call to the franken team that the coleman side was going to be aggressive on that score. >> what do you think the chances of senator franken will appear

with obama here this weekend? >> i would think that he would, but you know, he doesn't return my calls. neither of them. what do you think? >> i'll be at the football game. >> i think that he will. >> at some point, it became clear that franken was going to win possibly as early as the canvassing board decision. you didn't get a chance to speak with mr. ginsburg and senator coleman, what do you think cause them to drag it out for another six months and a second question, do you intend to market your book if florida? >> i've gotten some calls from people from news organizations in florida, so sure, that would be great. i prefer it here, but that would be fine.

the first question was -- i'm sorry. oh. i do think that they dragged it out so that franken wouldn't get seated, but i also believe they have the right to do it and i don't begrudge norm coleman that at all. much of the delay had nothing to do with what he did. on january 6, he appealed the canvassing board effort and for the election contest, he's entitled to do that. our laws do make it really quick. in 20 days, we had a trial. it wasn't miss fault the trial lasted seven weeks. the judges who are all good people and i got to know them, they gave him what he wanted. they were catching up on what this was all about. mark elife as said in virginia they give you two weeks for capital punishment cases. in minnesota, you get seven weeks for a recount that a guy already won and then when

coleman hey peels, shall did it shall -- appeals, he appeals to the minnesota supreme court, at lightning speed and one of the things i think, and maybe this is a minnesotaism, is the longer it took, the more the people realized this was fair and when elias, i write about what i think is one of the bigger mistakes, he attempted to get franken seated before the trial was done and the supreme court shot him down big time and franken, in the only decision that franken really made on the legal front early on, even before coleman appeals, franken -- elias approaches franken and says you won the recount, let's get you seated in washington and franken said no, don't do that. he knew he wanted to run again some day, he knew that minnesotans would think it's getting jammed down their throats, so while some people -- it did take forever for him to get there and did affect the new congress, i think in of the end, it was good for the process, but i'm -- i guess i'm a minnesotan

now. yeah. >> i got here a little late so i apologize if you already answered this. in the book, do you write about what al was doing during the recount, because i thought the person who had the toughest job was the person who had to roll him up in a rug so he wouldn't say anything. >> i don't write much about him other than he was fund raising. it was -- you know, it was decided political and public relations move to have him out of the picture. and some of us thought that senator coleman being in the courtroom often was a bad idea, because it really showed -- it seemed to indicate that he didn't have anything to do, you know, and after a while, when he was there often, there was a certain pathos and then he was there when there was a certain argument going on when his side was getting hammered by the

supreme court in the final arguments, so the message from the franken side was he's preparing to be a senator, he's in washington. of course, -- but i think that in the end, the thing that al franken did during this recount was delegate and follow instructions, and he did that -- i think he did the right thing. he democrat gated to -- he delegated to stephanie, she was the client and mark elias reported to her and they briefed franken every night, either by phone or in person and he had them over to the house a lot, but if you remember, he was only -- when the trial started, he made some appearances where he met with mayors and that sort of stuff to show that he was still around, but i don't think that they really had to roll him up in a carpet. i think he was chomping at the bit to go to washington, i know that, but i don't think he had much -- i don't think he had much -- he wasn't available to us at all, and the one long interview i had with him came in

january, when they were trying to establish the fact that he was going to be kind of senatorial. yes. >> you commented on the ballots that were found in the trunk, or allegedly found in the trunk. there was another set of ballots from the city of minneapolis, that were never located. >> >> right. 132 of those. >> have you been able to find them? >> i have them in my trunk. i wasn't asked to find them. but the judges ruled that they were valid votes. and this is the sort of, if you were a recount junkie, this is the famous, there were five envelopes, one of five, two of five, three of five, four of five, five of five and the number one is missing, so there's the theory we wouldn't count them, 2, 3, 4 and 5 without a 1 and this is where david has his kind of tv moment and he shows how far envelopes

can be slippery, and it's possible that someone had five of them an one of them slipped away. 1 inter 2 votes were counted that night. -- 132 votes were counted that night and the judges ruled as did the recount rules say that if they had been counted on that night and there was prima facie evidence that they existed, then they should count, so no. the 132 haven't been found and i believe there were 70 in roseville, as i recall, that also went missing. and those 132 were important to franken. i think he had a net of about 46. they were at the university and that's early on after that saturday morning sneak attack was also the issue of the coleman team accusing franken of wanting to raid the church, because it was at the university lutheran church of hope on campus and elias said we need to go everywhere, we need to dig in to the businessment and it became pa big kind -- no, those

ballots weren't found but they were counted. yes. >> if the -- was there any provision that if the election recount had gone into january, what would have happened, could pawlenty have appointed somebody? >> it did happen. on the day that they counted the first round of ballots, norm coleman's term expired and there are some states in which you could have attempted to be defeated and the senate seats, senators, and so a lot -- mark elias attempted to get out franken there and it's possible a supreme court somewhere said yes, he can be seated and we'll let the u.s. senate seat them. our supreme court didn't allow that.

they waited many weeks to say no to that. and so we didn't have a senator from january 3 until july isn't. -- july 7. >> a governor can appoint somebody during that period? >> not under those circumstances. and this leads to the question of whether we should have some sort of provisional seating here in minnesota. in louisiana, they did, and that caused a major controversy with mary landreaux maybe about eight or 10 years ago as i recall, and that -- i believe that we should, you know, that i think that if it looks like he's won the recount and the canvassing board has certified that he's gotten the most votes, i don't see why not and then if the coleman contest would have overturned it, then norm coleman would get the seat, but we were with just one senator for seven months, six months. >> do you have any thought as to

why norm coleman did not appeal to the u.s. supreme court? >> i'm not a lawyer either. but the people who read the opinions, the supreme court's opinions, said the one person, william mitchell, law professor, said it was unassailable, that the opinion that the supreme court wrote was so tightly written that it was hard. both the trial court and the supreme court, both acknowledge that there were no equal protection issues in this precount, like bush v. gore, so there weren't any federal issues that seemed to rise to it and i think at that point, i write in the book, they sort of knew what was coming because the way the supreme court argument went and when coleman opened his laptop and read it himself at his home, he just said that's it, i'm done. some other people on the phone were trying to say, i see a sentence here, i see there's an opening there and he said come on guys, there isn't any need to do it, so there just wasn't any

an issue there to bring. >> i'm sorry i'm late. maybe you already addressed this, but i'm interested in your take on the performance of mark richy, who is now being accused in this election year by his opponent of being party to pa variety of fraudulent or errors by -- during this process. tell us what you think about how he conducted himself during the whole recount? >> well, i like laurie a lot, but i did talk about that, and really, what i said was that he was -- he was in my view, so fair that it was the democrats who were more angry with him than the republicans, they thought that richie pentagon over backward to be fair and in the challenge ballots, there were about 1500 that were counted. there were a 96 percentage rate of agreement across the board, of the five canvassing board members and there were only 14, 3-2 votes on the boar and richie voted seven times with anderson

and magnusson and seven time with anderson and cleary, so i don't think there was any way he could have been fairer really and there's in indication that he sided with franken at all. even though he did appear with franken in some campaign appearances before the election. i've heard people say that the election was stolen. but it was stolen, you know, in plain view, with 12 judges, half of them appointed by republicans, and so i think mark richie did a fine job and again, i don't know him, i've never had dinner with him, i just watched him and he seemed to do -- and i was just in seattle and met with -- didn't meet with, but met the elections officials there, and richie is respected around the country for his, you know, attempts to be more modern and to change the system and a lot of things that we've changed in our system here on absentee ballots since 2008 were something that richy wanted beforehand, but tim pawlenty vetoed some of those, so it's not an endorsement or anything,

but i think he did a fair job. okay. well thanks everybody for coming. thank you. [applause] :

>> my name is reza kahlili. of course, that's not my real name, and i hope i'm not scaring anyone with my appearance here, the face and is the voice. -- the face and the voice. i was a student in the '70s, then after the iranian revolution, i went back hoping that i can help my country. my best friend was this

revolutionary guard, and i joined the revolutionary guard. we thought that my ec per tease would help with the establishment of infrastructure. but shortly after i witnessed horrific events. i witnessed torture, rape of girls, of the youth and i'm in prison just because i did not agree with the clerical establishment. i witnessed execution, i witnessed disrespect to human dignity, and i could no longer take it. i decided to travel back to the u.s., and i thought to myself that i can take my family and go back to u.s. u.s. was a second home to me. i had studied here, i had friends here.

but i thought that i cannot remain silent in the face of all the horrific things that this regime was doing to its people. and i thought that by contacting the u.s. authorities i could help bring change to the government, and if the americans knew what was going on there, they would help me help the iranian people. so i contacted the fbi, and they put me in touch with the cia. after several meetings of debriefings, in one of my meetings the cia case officer asked me if i was willing to go back to iran and become a spy, become their eyes and ears, as he put it. i agreed. i was sent to europe, and i was trained over there to receive coded messages over the radio and write invisible letters,

transferring information from the revolutionary guards. i had expected to get multitasking watch, a magical pen and perhaps the james bond car, but none of that happened, unfortunately. i was sent in with code books and some pencils and papers. throughout my years of working in the revolutionary guards, i had to battle a lot of mixed emotions because i had to repeatedly lie to my family of why i was being loyal to the force, and i couldn't reveal to them what my true nature was and what my purposes was because that would be endangering the whole family. i think the biggest shock to me was when i realized that the

west is not getting the message, that the west is is not realizing the dangers of this regime. that the west was willing to sidestep it principles and for what? for greed, for oil, for more contracts with the islamic regime. even though not only the iranians were being hurt and their blood spilled on the streets of tehran, but it was the americans who were paying also. the beirut bombing which over 241 servicemen, u.s. servicemen were killed and many other incidents. so my hopes was that the west would finally realize that this was a ruthless regime and it poses grave danger not only to the iranians and to the reg