Yeah, this is about right. I'm thinking Franken will come out about 150-200 votes ahead of Coleman at the end of all this.

I'm really impressed by the tenacity and organization of the Franken camp. I hope Franken comes out on top when all the votes are finally counted, because he's shown that he truly deserves this seat.

Strangely enough, the Republicans are probably dodging a BIG bullet here.

After today's revelations about Coleman using unreported money for home renovations, I'd say the odds of a Coleman indictment are approaching 1 in 1.

With a Franken victory look all the more certain, things could actually be worse for the R party were Coleman to win.

It would do a lot less damage to the Republican brand for Coleman to be indicted as a private citizen than as a sitting Republican Senator. He would be the second Republican Senator in successive years to be indicted for the Same Damn Thing.

So what the hell are the feds waiting for? There certainly seems to be more than enough evidence to indict Coleman, why can't they do it while he's still a sitting Senator?

I suppose getting Senator Franken AND a sitting Senator Coleman indictment is asking Santa for a bit too much. :)

I gotta tell ya, this Marc Elias fellow (along with whoever is managing Franken's campaign) sure learned some lessons from Al Gore about handling the political/media aspects of a tough recount.

They've done a GREAT job of putting out the narrative they want, and Coleman is pretty much reduced to responding to everything. This is so much better (from a D standpoint) than the coverage of the Bush/Gore recount.

When he gets elected he better say humorous things on the Senate floor. Otherwise, I will be sorely disappointed.

The Assistant SoS gave an example of wrongly excluded ballots today at the Canvass Board Meeting. He was discussing Duluth, the major city in St. Louis County. The Elections Judges in Duluth had sorted the excluded absentee ballots into the five piles, noticing that the given reason for exclusion for 40 of those Duluth ballots was failure to date voter and witness signatures on ballot envelopes. They then examined the law, the rules, and the voter instructions -- no mention at all of the requirement to date signatures. What was wrong here is that a cleck was applying a non-existant criteria to accepting ballots. So these 40 go into pile five, and get counted.

Duluth and St. Louis County (the county outside the city absentees have not been examined yet) are strongholds of the DFL -- probably runs 75-80% DFL. There could easily be a hundred ballots from St. Louis County that belong to Franken that have not yet been counted excluded on this mistaken criteria alone. An excellent example of Human Error that would never have been identified without a careful recount -- and a first class advertisement for why it is necessary to spend time and money training and re-training elections personnel. Who knows where the false criteria that signatures had to be dated came from -- but it now has been found and will be corrected to the benefit of voters who followed all the lawful directions.

Another example of good practice today was the treatment of the Dinkytown Precinct (W-3, P-1)that had 133 missing ballots at recount. Because Minnesota's system has built in redundancy, in the end the vote could be reconstructed in a valid way, and the missing votes on the 133 ballots included in Precinct totals.

I know this has been slow -- and the frustrated ask why we don't just have a run-off (not legal in Minnesota) but there are many examples of good practice evident in this recount that can be applied elsewhere. First -- it is important to put your standards into statute law, and not at the lower level of rulings by an SoS. The more detail the better -- as an example, what are the criteria for excluding an absentee ballot. I know such detail makes eyes swim, but you can see how important it is.

Second, the importance of building in redundancy in systems. 99 chances out of a hundred, you don't need them -- but once in a while you do. If your system has them, you can recover from errors, such as the loss of a ballot envelope.

Third, the necessity for training and re-training professional and election day workers so as to minimize human error in all aspects of the system.

Another thing to note -- this is a state with election day registration at the polls -- we have had this since 1974. Thus far we have had no claims of Fraud on these grounds. As a result we also have no provisional ballots to argue about --
and election day registration at the polls is how you correct mistakes in the voter rolls. Our Former Secretary of State, Joan Growe, who served for 24 years covering the period when we adopted registration at the polls, has testified in the legislatures in a number of states about how it is done -- and she says the rational for rejecting the idea is a belief in Fraud. (Imagine elected officials claiming "their people" are too prone to Fraud to adopt a better system???). There is a lesson here.

Rahm Emanuel talked with governor's office about who should fill Obama's Senate seat

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-rahm-obama13dec13,0,3359611.story

geez, this is taking forever. feels like the al franken decade.