Minnesota Recount Moves to Court
What a wild day in Minnesota. It started off with the state Canvassing Board, which is in charge of the recount, asking counties to count absentee ballots that were improperly rejected. The Board didn't think it had authority to order the counties to do this, so they just voted to "ask" them to do it and file amended vote counts with the results from these ballots.
Then the Canvassing Board decided that the 133 missing ballots in a Franken-friendly precinct would be counted as if they never went missing.
All in all, not a good day for the Coleman camp.
The Star-Tribune reported this afternoon that "The [Coleman] campaign said that it feared what it called a chaotic 'Florida situation' and that it is likely to go to the [state Supreme C]ourt today."
The article also reports, "At issue is how county-level canvassing boards sort rejected absentee ballots. The Coleman campaign has contended there has been an inconsistent application.
"'We want to make very sure that what happens in Thief River is the same thing that happens in Eagan and everywhere else,' said Coleman attorney Fritz Knaak at a news conference this afternoon."
A state official estimated that about 1,600 absentee ballots were improperly rejected, but that is just a rough estimate.
No one knows how these ballots would break between the two candidates, but a poll cited by FiveThirtyEight.com indicated an 8 point margin for Franken among absentees, which if true for this group would translate into a gain of 128 votes, according to Nate Silver. I wouldn't read much into that poll and Nate Silver I think misleads readers about its significance. First of all the number of absentee voters sampled was less than 100, so the margin of error there is huge, an error of about plus or minus 10 percentage points. So that could mean a margin of between 2 points for Coleman or 18 for Franken 95 times out of 100.
Second, the poll had Franken up by a five point margin, and we know the final result came out to a virtual tie. So IF the poll had no margin of error other than the error in discerning the actual difference in the candidates, then Franken nets perhaps 50 votes from the absentees. I wouldn't bet anything on that.
Both campaigns withdrew more challenges, but 4,472 still remain to be reviewed by the Board, which is hoping the campaigns will cut the number to 1,000 or less.
The Star-Tribune currently pegs Coleman's lead at 192 votes, including the so-called 133 missing ballots.
