I voted for Supreme Court Justice Lorie Skjerven Gildea last month. She seemed to be running against a bit of a wacko, and I'm a sucker for those reassuring Scandinavian middle/maiden names. I mean, she's one of us. She'll do the reasonable thing.

But Lorie's already on my s--t list for her vote for the ridiculous majority decision from the court yesterday on the Senate election absentee ballot mess. Two of the three justices who voted for it are T-Paw appointees (the other two Pawlenty justices serving on the Canvassing Board recused themselves but would have probably voted with the majority). Ventura appointee Helen Meyer wrote the goofy opinion.

Alan Page and Carlson appointee Paul Anderson demurred. Page's dissent (at the end of the court decision) says it quite elegantly. The court decided that the state statute allowing counties to correct vote totals for "obvious errors in the counting and recording of votes" does not apply in the case of erroneously uncounted/rejected absentee ballots. Talk about parsing something into irrelevance.

After deciding that, they came up with an unwieldy system for counting those ballots anyway--the system devised by the Secretary of State and Canvassing Board must meet the approval of the Coleman and Franken campaigns. What?!?! You're going to give interested parties veto power over the outcome and allow them to disenfranchise voters who are the victim of election judge incompetence? This is insanity. It's a gutless decision rooted in a shamelessly rigid interpretation of the statute or an attempt to shirk the responsibilities of justice.

I hear the Franken and Coleman campaigns are happy with this result. I don't really know why. It doesn't guarantee all the improperly excluded absentee ballots will get counted, nor does it set up any useful precedent to guide us in the future. Hopefully the Legislature will revise the statute in the winter to help the court do its job next time.