Franken Camp's Claim: We're Only Down By 84 Votes
A key new development in Minnesota: The Franken campaign is now giving an actual figure for what they think their true current deficit against Norm Coleman is -- an estimated statistic that has proven elusive in this drawn-out process.
"The differential between the two candidates is 84 votes," lead Franken recount lawyer Marc Elias just told a press briefing. "That obviously is down from the starting point of 215."
The public numbers from the Star Tribune currently show Coleman ahead by 210 votes, with 77% of the total ballots recounted. But the Franken campaign points to an obvious flaw in those numbers: All challenged ballots, regardless of the merits of the challenges, are taken out of the count for now until the state canvassing board can make a final ruling.
The Franken camp, however, says its observers have taken down what the opinions were of the on-site election judges, and get their number by assuming that the local officials' calls will ultimately be upheld.
In another new development, the state canvassing board is going to take up the question of rejected absentee ballots at a meeting tomorrow. On the call, Elias hammered away at the issue, hoping to get the board to rule in their favor and re-admit any viable ballots, rather than put it off to the courts.
"The lists of rejected ballots contain numerous indications of error on their face, by local officials in the rejection process," Elias said. As one example, Elias cited an instance in which election officials openly admitted, "we screwed up," in putting a ballot on the rejected pile.
"The fact is," Elias said, "no Minnesotan should be disenfranchised because, quote, 'we screwed up.'"
Elias also claimed some ballots might never been counted at all -- they could be stuck in the machines. "What you have here is a voting machine, and stuck in the bottom appears to be at least one ballot," Elias said, showing reporters a photo. "Now astonishingly, the election officials have refused our request to open the machine."
At the end of the day, this is probably going to be the closest statewide election in Minnesota history. Let's all hope it's not a repeat of the previous record-holder from 1962 -- which took until March of 1963 to resolve.
CT Voter, I think Eric did this post just for you. :-)
November 25, 2008 1:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
any tech difficulties commenting?
November 25, 2008 2:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
Not that I've noticed today.
November 25, 2008 2:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
yeah, your log in software sucks
when I log in to a page to post comment, I should be returned to the same page, post, diary or whatever I was in
the log in software you got takes me from this page to tpm cafe (and I was in tpm election central)
so I had to reload election central, the reopen this page, just to post this comment
if it takes me 15 minutes to find the post I wanna comment in again, that kinda screws up the process
that's a PROBLEM for me
November 25, 2008 6:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
Assuming Franken's stats are accurate, it doesn't look good for him. With 78% of the vote counted, he has reduced the deficit from 215 to 84. The reduction from 215 to 84 means the deficit has been decreased by 61%. Can he obtain the other 84 votes, 39% of the total deficit, when there are only 22% of the total ballots left to account. If my analysis is correct, he has to pick up new votes at a much greater clip than he has picked up during the counting that has occurred so far. Unless there are a lot of votes stuck in machines, highly unlikely, or there are a lot of improperly rejected absentee ballots (uncertain), he probably ends up losing by 40 votes
November 25, 2008 2:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't think you can extrapolate in that way. Much of what is still uncounted comes from Franken stronghold counties - Hennepin, Ramsey and St Louis. Is that good or bad for Franken? It's good if they find more of the old style Ballots used in St Louis and Ramsey counties which were simply not read by the machines. Franken got most of his gains so far in that manner. But Its also bad in the sense that there are more Franken votes for Coleman to challenge than vise versa.
Regardless of what side of this razor thin margin Franken comes out on, it's going to come down to two things: 1) The decision on rejected absentee ballots tommorow, and 2) Whether Minnesota's Laws which lay out how the canvasing board is supposed to impartially and transparently discern voter intent on the challenged ballots are as well defined and unambiguous as the Secretary of State keeps saying they are.
November 25, 2008 2:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
According to the Star Tribune web site, all the votes from St. Louis County have been recounted. From Hennepin, 80% has been recounted and from Ramsey 64% has been recounted. From the counties where no recounting has started yet, all but one went for Coleman.
I agree that the rejected absentee decision is important but how many of those ballots are we talking about?
November 25, 2008 2:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well I'm not sure what is being reported on the StarTrib site. According to the MPR site
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/2008/campaign/results/mn/recount/recount.php
Recounting has been completed in most counties. The only two that have a greater percentage of uncounted ballots than the metro counties are Becker and Steele - but those counties are tiny and have less than 8K total votes between them. Ramsey, on the other hand, has 63% of 153,000 votes counted and Hennepin 70% of 469,000 votes counted.
According to this:
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/11/25/recount_tues/
Franken is saying they have a list of 6,400 rejected ballots.
November 25, 2008 5:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think the figures indicate that Franken will end the recount down 20 to 60 votes. There are 6000 to 8000 rejected absentee ballots. It's going to depend whether the election board allows challenges to the rejections during the recount (the purpose of the hearing tomorrow), how many of the rejections are set aside (if the board allows that) and then if the invalidated rejects break in favor of Franken. Still an uncertain outcome but I don't think the odds favor Al.
November 25, 2008 5:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
You are right - MPR site doesnt include counties where counting hadn't started as of this AM... about 120,000 votes total, most of which come from Coleman counties - roughly similar to the still uncounted metro votes.
November 25, 2008 5:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
Regarding your 2). If the examples posted on the MPR site are sorta representative, I think unbiased opinions of intent ARE easily accomplished. Looking at those examples and how readers viewed them, in almost every case there is clear consensus on which way the vote should count, or not count at all.
Hell, what they should do is post all disputed ballots into an online poll and let the public give a thumbs up or thumbs down.
November 25, 2008 3:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Let's all hope it's not a repeat of the previous record-holder from 1962 -- which took until March of 1963 to resolve."
Why? Carl Rolvaag (D) won that one even though Elmer Anderson (R) had the lead going into the recount. As a Minnesotan I would love to have a similar result in this case. I can wait until spring to know.
November 25, 2008 2:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
I suspect the old [Scalia] adage will ring true: candidates are entitled to a fair process, not a perfect process.
Franken's in trouble. The rejected absentees will be struck from the electoral recount process and the winner will be the one who has the most votes subject to the recount. That means Franken, according to his own team, needs 84 more votes from the challenged ballot total than he's currently projecting. We'll see, but I don't think he is going to win.
November 25, 2008 5:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
Scalia is wrong. Elections are not about candidates - they're about voters, and voters are entitled to have their votes counted. They have every right to expect that they will not be disenfranchised by imperfect equipment or counting methods.
December 1, 2008 5:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm keeping my fingers crossed. I've been a fan of Al Franken for many years and would really enjoy watching him in the Senate.
November 25, 2008 10:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
I've seen Franken lose votes in a precinct that voted heavily for him. I've seen the same thing happen to Coleman. I've seen Franken pick up votes in strong republican precincts. Same for Coleman.
NealMN, your analysis looks like a linear model. I haven't seen evidence of linear behavior by the numbers. Making a list of county/precinct, total votes cast, original distribution of votes (number and % by candidate), and new distribution of votes after recount (number and % by candidate) does not yield any sort of linear equation.
I don't have the patience to plug this into one of those formula calculators to see if a quadratic equation or some non-linear function can describe the pattern in the data and predict a result. Anyway, the count is so close that it's going to come down to the challenged ballots.
My main point is we still have cause for optimism because the result reported at the end of today can easily change in Franken's favor. We can be glad that Minnesota's process is decent enough to have a realistic shot at counting damn near every ballot and getting damn near every one of them tallied as the voter intended.
Mistakes of a few hundred votes here and there usually don't matter. It does in this case, and we have a good crew working on getting this right. Viva la Paper Ballot!
November 25, 2008 11:43 PM | Reply | Permalink