Franken camp claims lead
In the wild Minnesota Senate race between Democrat Al Franken and GOP incumbent Norm Coleman, the Franken campaign claims they have taken the lead in the recount, by 22 votes.
The Coleman campaign went into the recount with a miniscule 215 vote lead- out of almost three million ballots cast, sending the race into an automatic recount.
Since the recount started, there have been wild swings of events with counting the ballots. Just yesterday, the Franken campaign discovered that they picked up 37 votes when 171 ballots were inexplicably found due to a machine error in Maplewood.
The two candidates have also gone to court several times, which most recently resulted in Franken losing a key decision that prevents them from looking over rejected absintee ballots to check for human errors.
The current count of the recount from the Minnesota Secretary of State shows Franken with an almost 3,000 vote lead, but look at that cautiously for now, because it does not include the challenged ballots. Each campaign has the right to challenge ballots in the recount, which removes the ballot from getting counted at all.
For some examples of the ballots the campaigns are challenging, click here. Keep in mind that Minnesota has very liberal voter intent laws, all the voter has to do is "show" that they wanted to vote for a certain candidate, and their vote counts.
Stay tuned for continuing developments, as they seem to happen every day in this wild recount.
EDIT: This post originally said misstated who currently holds the lead according to the Minnesota Secretary of State Web site. It has been corrected.
2:09 p.m., Dec. 3, 2008
Jon said:
It's December 3rd as I write this, approximately two hours after the above was posted, and the Minnesota Secretary of State web site on the recount, which hasn't changed since 8pm on the evening of December 2nd, shows: RECOUNT Number of Ballots for Coleman (as recounted) 1119878 RECOUNT Number of Ballots for Franken (as recounted) 1122413 Is it really so difficult to understand that that means the one who is ahead by almost 3,000 votes (2,535 to be precise) in the recount to date is Franken rather than Coleman? Not that that's a very meaningful number since some Coleman leaning counties have only started their recounts today but, if you're going to report that difference, could you at least exhibit the reading comprehension of a middle schooler and report it accurately?