Developments in the Recount Process May Boost Franken's Chances

by Damozel | Deb Cupples wrote about Franken's expected challenge to the exclusion of 12,000 ballots.  In the meantime, he's also picked up more votes.  The Minnesota Star Tribune (via Memeorandum) reports:

Franken unexpectedly picked up 37 votes due to a combined machine malfunction and human error on Election Day that left 171 Maplewood ballots safe, secure but uncounted until Tuesday's final day of recounting in Ramsey County. Secretary of State Mark Ritchie's office immediately asked county officials to explain what had happened, and U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman's campaign said it sent its own experts to Ramsey County to review the situation and said it was "skeptical about [the ballots'] sudden appearance."  (MST)

Will the pendulum swing in Franken's favor?

The day's other news -- which Franken's campaign quickly described as a "breakthrough" -- came when [Secretary of State] Ritchie's office asked local election officials to examine an estimated 12,000 rejected absentee ballots and determine whether their rejection fell under one of four reasons for rejection defined in state law. The Secretary of State's office asked that ballots that were rejected for something other than the four legal reasons be placed into a so-called "fifth category."  (MST)

According to The Hill, "Minnesota law says absentee ballots can only be rejected based on name and address discrepancies, if the voter’s signature is not valid, if the voter is not registered to vote or if the voter already cast a ballot, either in person or by absentee ballot.

The fifth category, Ritchie's office said, could also include absentee ballots rejected for reasons that were "not based on factual information."

Ritchie's office, while stressing that the ballots be examined but not counted, asked that the task be completed by Dec. 18.

The move appeared to give at least some new life to the Franken campaign's longstanding effort to add to the recount what it estimates are as many as 1,000 improperly rejected absentee ballots.  (MST)

TPM points out that this may show that "[Ritchie's] office is taking seriously the Franken camp's contention that roughly 1,000 absentee ballots may have been wrongly thrown out by clerical errors, and should be re-admitted."  Though they concede there is another potential explanation: "he's just diligently preparing for the inevitable litigation over this matter." (TPM)

The Star Tribune says that Coleman is leading by 305 points.  But TPM argues that 'this number has the flaw of taking all challenged ballots out of the count completely until the canvassing board adjudicates them, and there are about 20 times more challenged ballots than the apparent Coleman lead."  In other words, Coleman's lead was computed by assuming that all challenged ballots will remain uncounted.  The Franken camp estimates that Coleman is ahead by 50 votes.

This number alone now reduces Franken's deficit to a mere 13 votes -- a number that could be easily undone as the remaining 7% of the ballots are counted. So depending on how other factors turn out, things are suddenly looking very good for Al.(TPM)

But, TPM cautions:

The Franken camp's methodology comes from taking down what the opinions were of the local election judges on those challenged ballots. This method, too, has a flaw: We are dependent on the Franken campaign's data being accurate, and also on their assumption that the local officials' judgments on those ballots will be upheld.

Nate Silver earlier had Coleman as a slight favorite.  Now he is not so sure.

He notes that Franken's methodology for determining his lead are probably closer to accurate than the Secretary of States."

[T]he Secretary of State treats all challenged ballots as nonvotes until they are addressed by the Canvassing Board, effectively allowing either campaign to deduct votes from the opponent's total by challenging legal ballots. However, since the vast majority of such challenges will be rejected, the Franken campaign's standard is probably more reasonable....

I have also had conversations with senior Franken officials and been quoted similar numbers, and believe there is strong reason to regard the Franken campaign's claims as credible -- they are tracking every challenged ballot in every precinct, and have far more information about the nature of ballot challenges than is publicly available. (FiveThirtyEight.com)

Furthermore, Franken's net gain of 37 votes "is a very big deal" and "makes a huge amount of difference in a race that could easily be decided by a small, double-digit margin."

If the 37-vote gain in added to the 50-vote margin that the Franken campaign estimated that it trailed by at the start of the day, that would put them just 13 votes behind with 8-9 percent of the state's votes still left to be counted. That is to say, according to the Franken campaign's methodology, the race will likely be effectively tied as we head toward the challenge stage of the recount process. (FiveThirtyEight.com) 

Finally, Silver concedes that Secretary of State Ritchie's instruction to review the absentee ballots "potentially (although far from certainly) a precursor to those ballots actually being counted, a process which we estimated would result in a net gain of 25 to 100 votes for Franken (the Franken campaign believes a similar number of ballots are at stake)."

He concludes:

All in all, it is suddenly much more difficult to make the case that Coleman is the favorite in the recount. If the absentee ballots wind up being counted, the opposite may in fact be true.

It's clearly far from over.  As Todd Beeton says, the reality is that "once all votes are counted and recounted, this thing may not be close to over; this Senate race is likely to go to the courts or even to the US Senate."

Memeroandum has more.

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