THIS IS EXCELLENT NEWS!! FOR NORM!!!

!!!COLEMENTUM!!!!

Great news!

If the Franken campaign has a list of all the withdrawn challenges with the information about how the local boards ruled on the ballots they could easily come up with an accurate figure for how the recount process, without the absentee and other challenges, will end.

I'm crossing my fingers that Franken's people performed the full count and can be certain of what they claim. I'm a little nervous that they don't have an exact figure.

The Star-Tribune projection is not scientifically based.

If Franken is ahead before the absentee ballot questions are settled, Coleman is going to have to reverse and want the absentee ballots counted, unless he thinks he can win one of his wing and a prayer challenges.

The road looks good from here.

What reason does the Coleman camp give for believing that some absentee ballots were counted twice?

DallasNE -- the duplicate ballot problem is as you suggest a process matter. Many Absentee ballots come in folded, and cannot be run through the scanners. In addition, this year Minnesota allowed absentee voters outside the US (Service members, Americans Abroad, Peace Corps), to request absentee ballots by internet, and receive them by E-Mail. Once received, they had to be printed out by the voter, voted, and returned either by fax or in the mail. Many of these arrived on paper too thin to process in the scanners, which are set to receive card stock paper ballots. As a result the elections manual was changed -- with the knowledge of and agreement by the candidates -- to process these ballots by creating a duplicate ballot on the proper precinct's normal ballots, running them through the scanner, and then keeping the original and the duplicate together in an envelope, precinct by precinct. This went fine through the unofficial count on Election night.

The problem emerged because the criteria for vote counting in the recount is different from the election day process. "Intent of the Voter" is the recount standard, and for this reason in the recount only the originals were to be used. The Scanner, for instance, can't read whether one put identifying marks on a ballot (which disqualifies it) and it might not read accurately certain types of corrections. The problem may be that some election day judges did not properly recover and match up and place in the "duplicate" envelope the duplicate ballots run through the scanner. Most of our scanners have a button thingie on the back that needs to be tripped so that the ballot does not go into the sealed ballot box, but rather goes through the scanner and is recovered out the back -- and it could be that in some precincts this was not done properly. Both Franken and Coleman have raised this matter -- but only Coleman in a formal way.

Once this is over it is something Mark Richie will need to attend to. Using the internet to deliver properly requested ballots makes much sense in economic terms (saves the SOS a hell of a lot of postage), and it certainly makes voting more accessable to service people and others abroad. (a good many of these disputed duplicates are from Afghanistan and Iraq -- Al does well there given the popularity of his old USO shows.) And, it might make sense to do all out of state absentee ballots this way as a cost saving matter assuming they can build in security. Then they need to train or re-train the election day workers to the new process. One suggestion is to count all absentee ballots centrally -- I think that will be considered.

You only get down to this level of detail in an election system when virtually every vote really counts. And it is a virtue of a recount of a very close election that it also serves as an extreme audit of your system. I am thankful we have only found two serious system problems -- the lost envelope of ballots in MPLS 3-1 and this duplicate matter. The Legislature needs to deal with it in the upcoming session. One of our strengths is that we tend to move quickly to put the necessary rules into statute law, thus leaving very little for lawyers to argue about on a partisian basis.