Franken Camp's Claim: We've Cut Coleman's Lead To Under 100 Votes
Has Al Franken cut Norm Coleman's lead down to double digits? That's what the Franken campaign just claimed in a briefing with reporters.
The current estimates from the Star Tribune have Coleman up by about 130 votes, but the Franken campaign claims the true difference is much less than that when you take into account disputed ballots that aren't included right now in the totals but are likely to be resolved pretty easily by the state canvassing board.
Even if a challenged ballot is taken out of the total recount pool for the time being, the Franken campaign thinks it has an idea of what the numbers will eventually look like based on the opinions of the election workers at the individual sites -- and they think the real Coleman lead right now is less than 100 votes, instead of the current common estimate of over 130.
Franken's lead recount lawyer Marc Elias also pointed out that with 51.1% of the ballots recounted so far, the portion that has been counted were from disproportionately Republican areas -- so the remaining votes could end up having even more error-corrections that boost Franken than we've seen already.
This is smart: Pre-spin to pre-empt claims of stealing the election if the challenged votes tip the outcome.
November 21, 2008 2:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
It's a hunch, but it's seems plausible, and it happens to be one I share. It's gonna come down to those disputed ballots. Then, it'll be settled in court after that. It's gonna be a while, in any case and it's going to be very, very close.
Oh, and fuck you Lieberman for endorsing Coleman! (I had to put that in there).
November 21, 2008 2:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
lol!
November 21, 2008 2:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
Wait -- Lieberman endorsed Coleman?
Why am I even paying attention... this one's over.
November 21, 2008 2:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
This is silly.
The whole point of a challenge is that one side thinks it should win the challenges it is fielding and disagrees with what its opponents are saying. So it's silly to quote Franken's assessment of what will happen based on how challenges will be ruled.
November 21, 2008 2:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
but I also agree that it's a very good sign for Franken that the ballots are coming from more GOP precincts (Coleman leads by 3% among the ballots that have been recounted, so what remains is more Democratic than average).
November 21, 2008 2:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
I believe the ballots that the Franken camp is counting were challenged only because the voters had voted for McCain and Franken. I have no idea why the Coleman camp thinks that's a reasonable basis for a challenge, but I doubt very much that the canvassing board will agree with it.
As someone on another blog commented, both campaigns have probably made some frivolous challenges, but it seems as if the Coleman campaign alone has engaged in organized, frivolous challenging of votes.
November 21, 2008 2:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
Don't forget the absentee ballots that were invalidated. Franken won his suit to get the data on where they were and why they were invalidated. He could conceivably pick up some more votes if these are eventually counted.
November 21, 2008 6:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, here is the ringer in those Absentee Ballots.
We have no idea who the ballots might be for, we don't have party registration in Minnesota, so unless someone "really knows" no one knows.
The process of not accepting absentees is done by County Election Officials, and there are 87 counties, and if those officials did not use exactly the same criteria in making the disqualifications, and in some counties ballots were accepted and counted that have the exact same problems -- then we are down to an equal protection issue, which is food for the courts.
I don't know exactly how clear state law is on the question of criteria for disqualification, but none the less -- if very similar ballots were treated differently among counties, then the fact that the potentially disqualifiable ballots are already counted could easily push the court to accept the similar ones, on equal protection grounds -- with a possible message to the Legislature to get cracking and clarify the law.
The Franken Campaign which brought the suit in Ramsey County for the public records, so as to understand why ballots were disqualified -- and is now getting the same information from other counties, is not saying much about what they are learning. Good Strategy. We'll see where it goes, but I believe this is what is involved.
November 21, 2008 7:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
Cautiously optimistic!
November 21, 2008 2:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ha! That's been my motto too lately. Hope has been replaced with cautious optimism.
November 21, 2008 2:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
lol...Hope has become obsolete to me.
November 21, 2008 2:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, we conceivably can, under certain not-implausible circumstances!
November 21, 2008 4:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
Santa Watch.
November 21, 2008 2:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
So how's this playing in the Minnesota media? TV? papers?
November 21, 2008 2:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
Minnesota is a freakin' looney bin. It's impossible to gauge what people are thinking. A disturbing number of my friends voted for Dean Barkley. When I ask them why, they usually tell me they didn't like Franken's "negative ads". Apparently Coleman went 100% positive this time around. I musta missed something...
November 21, 2008 2:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
Because the state bird of Minnesota is the Common Loon its most appropriate that you called the place a looney bin!
November 21, 2008 3:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
No he didn't. He was running incredibly dishonest and slimy ads right up to about the last week or two and then announced that he wasn't going to run anymore negative ads. Of course he didn't say that he was going to stop the RNC from running some of the most disgusting ads to date. So all the while Normy could try to claim to be above it all while the RNC was frantically slinging the mud.
November 21, 2008 3:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh, believe me, I saw his filthy ads. I would assume my Barkley supporting friends did too, but they seem to have only noticed the negative ads Al Franken released. I'll admit, I was born and raised here, but I really don't get this place at all. Jesse Ventura? Jeez. Give me a freakin' break.
November 21, 2008 3:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
I saw Al down at the Green Mill a few nights ago and I asked him how he thought it was going. He said, "We're still in it." I tried to get more out of him, but he clearly doesn't want to jinx the deal by talking about it. But I got the impression he's pretty hopeful about the outcome. I told him he needed to win because we need someone in the Senate who's got the comedic skills to torment Mitch McConnell and Lindsay Graham.
Things are looking better all the time:
http://ww2.startribune.com/news/metro/elections/returns/2008/recount/msenco.html
November 21, 2008 2:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
I talked to someone else the other day that said Al was at the Green Mill. I am there a lot, sorry I missed him.
November 21, 2008 3:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
What's really weird is, Carl Eller was down there that night too. I kept wondering if there was some celebrity event going on or something. Seemed like a regular old night to me, though...
November 21, 2008 3:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
Was Eller wearing that backwards cap?
November 21, 2008 3:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
The cap with the wide black and white stripes that matches his jumpsuit? Yeah, he was.
November 21, 2008 4:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
Took a look at the newspaper's site, and while I'm a huge Franken supporter (auto-donater since the day he went off the air) I'm worried by the county-by-county stats.
Most counties are so close to even that what's won in one will statistically be lost in another. This leaves the following:
Dem counties in process or to be counted: Carleton, Hennepin, Mower, Ramsey, St.Louis
Rep counties in process or to be counted: Scott, Sherburne, Stearns, Washington, Wright.
Note that several of the Republican counties won't start counting until Nov 25th (Sherburne, 2:1 Republican) or Dec 3rd (Scott and Wright, both 3:2 Republican.)
Two conclusions: that Franken should have observers NOW in these Republican counties, assuring the ballots are not f'ed with, and that this baby's going to end up in court.
November 21, 2008 2:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
Key point for the MN recount-obsessed. It appears certain that the tally after the current count will not be dispositive: all will turn on the disposition of the perhaps 2000 or so challenged ballots to be ruled on by the Canvassing Board (composed mostly of elite state judges) in December.
The vast majority of the challenges will likely be denied, since they are partisan attorney's efforts to overturn initial determinations by election officials that particular ballots should be counted (or not counted) as votes for one of the two contestants. So it might seem that the challenges will be more or less a wash, unless one side or the other was systematically more likely to identify mistakes by the local officials.
However, even if mistake-identification is evenly distributed between the two sides; and even if the percentage of challenges that are overruled is the same for both sides; and even if the two campaigns challenge the exact same numbers of ballots, the Canvassing Board review could result in a large swing of votes for one candidate or the other.
That is because there are two types of ballots a candidate can challenge: (1) ballots (allegedly) wrongfully counted as votes for the opponent; and (2) ballots (allegedly) wrongly excluded from the count for the challenging candidate. When the former type of challenge is overruled by the Canvassing Board (as most challenges will be), it increases the opponent's vote tally by one. When the second challenge is overruled, it results in no change to the tally (because the local officials had already determined no valid vote).
Some have speculated that Coleman's challenges are disproportionately "type 1" challenges; and Franken's Type 2. (This would be consistent with stereotypes of Democrats as wanting to include problematic, nonstandard votes, and of Republicans taking a stricter approach). If this speculation -- and that's all it is, as far as I can tell -- then the Canvassing Board proceeding may result in a significant swing for Franken even if Coleman's observers are no more error prone, or no more likely to abuse the challenge process, than Franken's.
November 21, 2008 2:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
What's most concerning to me is that we always seem to have these sizeable shifts in the totals when we have recount.
Why can't this country ... the shining example of democracy to the world ... do a better job of handling our elections and counting the votes?
November 21, 2008 5:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't think that's accurate, that we always have these shifts. It seems the shifts are always tiny. In this case, a change of 500 votes between election night and certification is not only much small than normal, but infinitesimal considering there were over 2.9 million votes. Clearly the counting system under Mark Ritchie is excellent. A shift of 100 votes halfway through the recount is similarly tiny. We've actually got a very good system. For all the nonsense about another Florida or Ohio, we do have a model system in Minnesota.
November 22, 2008 1:00 AM | Reply | Permalink
Fewer votes. Not less votes. You can't have a fraction of a vote. You can have less support, but votes are discreet numbers, not continuous amounts.
November 21, 2008 6:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
my inner grammar nazi thanks you for the clarification between the correct use of fewer versus less.
however, my inner spelling nazi is going to sentence you to 10 days' hard labor for using 'discreet' where you should have used 'discrete'.
November 21, 2008 7:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ha! I love it!
November 22, 2008 4:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
Here's a look at some of the challenged ballots, who challenged them and why. Looking at them, I get the feeling that not very many of the challenges will succeed.
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/features/2008/11/19_challenged_ballots/
November 21, 2008 6:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
I dunno. If MN law says that signatures and other identifying marks invalidate a ballot, then the 2 where folks signed their names need to be tossed, although I don't buy that the smudgy fingerprint counts as an identifying mark. Someone just got their finger in the ink vs. deliberately inking up and leaving a "signature." What about where the voter wrote in Bachman, but bubbled in Coleman? In a previous election in a different state (so probably not relevant), voters who wrote in a name, but forgot to also bubble, were counted as not having voted. The same reasoning would call this a vote for the bubbled Coleman and not an overvote due to lack of bubble on the second name; but Franken was right to have called it out for scrutiny. I'm mystified by people who choose to indicate their choice by marks other than bubbles. They may be morons, but their intent is pretty clear.
You're right, many of these challenges are grasping at straws, but there are an amazing number where you can only scratch your head and wonder how that voter can walk and talk at the same time. Fortunately, MN's law says intent counts, so most of these oddball ballots can be decifered and assigned to the intended candidate.
November 21, 2008 7:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
Scratching my head, I came up with a few simple explanations. . .
Perhaps you're right about barely being able to walk - my grandma had a hard time walking and seeing by the time she was 70.
It isn't that crazy that someone with bad eyesight would not see the lightly marked "bubble", and circle the dark bubble just to the side of the name.
November 22, 2008 1:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
Al Franken is picking up many votes and we all hope he's going to win!
November 22, 2008 3:40 AM | Reply | Permalink
in this situation, it is obvious that an accurate recount is impossible. georgia is on to something with their runoff. of course they had a clear winner, who will win again. only in the usa do we suffer through an eight year period of governmental stupidity because of a broken and corrupt electoral system. now have a runoff in a state with a clear winner but have a tortured recount in another state where the recount will be surely disputed by the loser.
November 22, 2008 5:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
and we have idiots voting in mass for a third party protest vote. the only thing we don't have is katherine harris figure. this is all wellstone's fault for that partisan funeral that was so hurtful to coleman and all republicans in our time of mourning way back when. wellstone was really selfish and out of line to do that.
November 22, 2008 5:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
Give up Frankie has lost. Smiles for everyone!
Oh and I am afraid there is not going to be a 60 majority, ha ha ha
November 22, 2008 8:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
Little late for this: why are there so many issues with ballots? Millions of people take the time to vote.Then have to wonder if they 'x'd correctly.
Sure if they missed the paper the vote should not count.
All these other issues are insane. Why spend millions on election boards and voting machines they have years to prepare when they can't even make a ballot?
Maybe they should go back to the very old method to pick a winner by determining the length of their nose.The longer nose of course means a bigger lier.The shorter nose should win(in a real world).
This is done by wrapping string around the nose one layer deep. Quick and simple. The longer string is the loser.
November 22, 2008 8:15 PM | Reply | Permalink