Late Update: Norm Coleman's apparent lead has been cut to a mere five votes at the close of business today, according to the running vote count from the Star Tribune, down from a 358-vote lead last night. Al Franken seems poised to take the lead tomorrow as the state canvassing board sorts through the remaining hundreds of ballot challenges from the Coleman campaign, which have been mostly frivolous attempts to throw out Franken votes.

Don't look now, but it looks like Al Franken may win the Minnesota Senate race.

A series of developments in the last few days have given the very strong impression that Al is suddenly in a position to prevail -- and a resolution of the fight might even come as early as tomorrow.

For those of you who haven't been playing close attention to every twist and turn in the recount fight, let's take stock of where we are, a month and a half into this epic struggle of vote-counting and legal battles that has seen the conventional wisdom swing dramatically from one side to the other.

Franken is still nominally behind in the vote count. But he's been steadily gaining on Coleman all day today, and the pace things have been going at points to a very narrow Franken win when the dust is settled.

The Minnesota state canvassing board has spent this week reviewing disputed ballots, which either side is arguing should be counted as a vote for themselves or not counted for the other guy. The board spent the last two days almost entirely on Franken's challenges, and is now getting started on Norm Coleman's.

We now have a good idea of the merits of Coleman's ballot challenges, a crucial missing piece of the puzzle here: They mostly stink, and Coleman is doing much worse than Franken did when the board was reviewing Al's challenges over the last two days.

If this math continues -- which seems likely, but could go either way -- Franken will very likely win.

Here's how we got to this point.

Initial Recount Helps Franken

Coleman led by around 600 votes the morning after the election, and things looked very good for him. An automatic recount was triggered under state law, but it hardly seemed possible for Franken to win. But over the next few days, localities began adjusting their spreadsheet errors, a standard process in almost all elections -- revealing that the race was even closer than originally thought, at a 215-vote Coleman lead, or a 0.007% margin out of 2.9 million votes.

Then came the actual recount, as those millions of ballots were sorted and counted by hand. More votes started turning up, ranging from ballots that were marked too lightly for the optical-scan machines to read them, to ballots that weren't counted because of outright machine breakdowns on Election Night. And the anecdotal evidence was that these instances were breaking for Franken.

One thing served to hide all this, though: The state's recount procedure allows either campaign to dispute a local official's call on a ballot, taking all those votes completely out of the count until they came to the state canvassing board for review this week. The campaigns issued thousands of these challenges, mostly frivolous, in an apparent game by the Coleman campaign to manipulate the totals and public opinion.

But now those ballots have come up for review, with Franken's challenges going this past Tuesday and Wednesday, and Coleman's starting today. And a clearer picture has been emerging.

Coleman's Challenges Largely A Bust

What's become clear is that the vast, overwhelming majority of Coleman's challenges have been efforts to not get ballots counted for Franken. By contrast, Franken had a decent number of challenges designed to get his own votes counted, on top of his mostly-failed efforts to get apparent Coleman ballots tossed. Coleman had very few of these -- almost none, really.

The result is that most of Coleman's challenges to Franken's votes were a bust, while some of Franken's efforts to get ambiguous ballots into his own column largely held up. To be sure, the possibility still exists that there could be actual meritorious Coleman challenges coming down the pipeline, but the pattern seems to be established in Franken's favor.

And by the way, the challenged ballots also provide some great comedy. The infamous "Lizard People" ballot was not counted for Franken, but another ballot in which the voter filled in the Franken oval and then added writing to Al's name so it read "Al Frankenstin" (sic) was in fact given to Franken. So Franken may well be a grotesque monster, but that person clearly voted for him.

The Absentee Ballot Controversy

Then there's the question of absentee ballots that were improperly rejected because of clerical efforts. The Franken camp has been hammering away to get them readmitted, and Franken won a big victory this past Friday when the canvassing board ruled in favor of readmitting them. That prompted the Coleman campaign to go to the state Supreme Court to stop the counting of any such votes. A ruling is expected any day now. If they rule for Coleman, Franken could still win. And if they rule against Coleman, then it's over, because these votes are expected to break solidly for Franken.

Of course, that still wouldn't mean it's over for good. The Coleman campaign has made an opposite complaint about absentees: That due to clerical errors, some of them might have been counted twice. If Franken wins by just a few votes, this could become the legal basis of a legal challenge to the whole election.

So What's Next?

The canvassing board has said they hope to certify the election and declare a winner by tomorrow. It doesn't seem likely that they can pull it off, but it just might happen. No matter when they certify it -- and no matter who they certify it for -- the state fully expects the other candidate to file a legal challenge of some kind. And those challenges could potentially go all the way to the final authority on the legitimacy of Senate elections: The U.S. Senate itself.

But as of right now, it looks like Franken will win. It just might take awhile.