As we noted below, there's been a potentially huge development in the Franken recount: 171 new ballots have been found in the St. Paul suburb of Maplewood, reportedly because a machine breakdown prevented them from being counted the first time but the hand count easily picked them up.

So is there any chance that this could change the outcome?

The answer, like pretty much everything else in this recount, is a definite maybe.

It's simply not conceivable that these ballots alone would deliver Franken the win -- he's not going to carry all of them, but would instead get a small edge. As the local site MinnPost.com calculates, these ballots could give Franken a net gain of 12 votes, assuming they break in the same percentages as the rest of the precinct did.

But the found ballots could give Franken a big lift. The Franken camp's current calculation is that he trails Norm Coleman by 50 votes in this recount as of last night. So if the MinnPost calculation is accurate, this would narrow Franken's deficit to a mere 38 votes -- a margin that could be much more plausibly reversed in the remaining 7% of the vote yet to be recounted.

Of course, there are a whole bunch of other variables still at play, so the net impact of the new found ballots is tough to predict. But in a race as close as this one, they could potentially prove to be decisive.

Late Update: The Coleman campaign is calling foul, claiming the total ballots for this precinct now exceed the number of voters who officially signed in by 31 people -- and they're also saying these new ballots would apparently give Franken a net pickup of 37 votes, though it's not exactly clear how they concluded this. The county is looking into the situation.