Challenge:
On election night, Al Franken trailed Republican incumbent Norm Coleman by approximately 725 votes (later reduced to 215 after the results were re-checked). Given the closeness of the margin, Minnesota law called for an automatic statewide recount. There was a strong sense that Franken would pick up additional votes in a recount and the campaign’s field staff had determined that a large number of absentee ballots had been improperly rejected. With only two weeks’ notice, a recount effort spanning all 87 counties had to be prepared, requiring a huge staffing increase, thousands of volunteers and a sophisticated vote tracking system.
Solution:
grassroots solutions, working closely with campaign leadership and the state DFL Party, helped design the overall recount field strategy. This included the rapid hiring and deployment of new staff, a restructuring of the campaign’s field and political operations to reflect the realities of the recount, an absentee ballot “chase” program and the linking of the field and legal strategies. grassroots solutions also directly oversaw the statewide training of all recount volunteers, including development of the training curriculum, building a volunteer training model, creating real-life simulations, and leading recount training sessions across the state. As the recount began, grassroots solutions’ targeting expert helped design a real-time reporting and tracking system that monitored the process and projected outcome scenarios.
Results:
- The recount demonstrated that Al Franken had won, as the margin shifted from a 215 vote deficit to a 312 vote victory.
- The campaign trained over 2,000 recount volunteers statewide in just five days.
- The campaign’s tracking and reporting of the count was subsequently lauded as the most accurate data available, aiding the Franken legal team throughout the recount.