Abdication of Responsibility

Perhaps I’m missing something, but it seems clear to me that Minnesota court’s order that both the Franken and Coleman campaigns had agree to a standard for counting improperly excluded ballots is pretty much the stupidest thing ever. Maybe before the election establishing such standards by mutual agreement could work, but after the fact? Of course the Coleman campaign doesn’t want to include improperly excluded ballots, and I can’t even blame them. The role of the courts in this situation is to develop a standard consistent with state statutes, not to delegate the decision-making to third parties even though the incentives in play make a mutual agreement virtually impossible. The impasse now being reached was of course inevitable, and it seems likely that the court will have to step in anyway.

UPDATE: Adam Platt had more.