It's now official that Al Franken is ahead in the Minnesota recount by 50 votes, after the state canvassing board finally approved a spreadsheet of all the ballots that have been counted, recounted and examined again over this very long process. And while it now appears to be almost certain that Franken will defeat GOP Sen. Norm Coleman in the end, it's hardly over.

The board did some last-minute reviews and corrections this morning, sorting out complaints from both campaigns of clerical errors in the allocations of some of the challenged ballots. And so Al Franken, who entered the recount down by 215 votes, is currently ahead by a margin of 0.00171% out of over 2.9 million votes.

Now we get into a very messy stage in this process: Getting the two campaigns to agree on which rejected absentee ballots were wrongly thrown out and ought to be put into the pool, under the state Supreme Court's ruling that has given the campaigns effective veto power over whether any new individual votes are to be counted even when local officials say they were wrongly thrown out.

So far the campaigns have not agreed to anything, with the Coleman campaign appearing to be the more belligerent player -- an outcome that could easily be predicted after the court handed down its opinion. The campaigns do face threatened sanctions for bad-faith behavior, but it remains to be seen if any new ballots at all will be counted.

Late Update: Al Franken has released this statement:

"Today, the state canvassing board completed an important step in this process. I'm glad to be ahead, and as it appears that we're on track to win, I want Minnesotans to know that I'm ready to get to work for them in Washington on Day One. We still need to ensure that Minnesotans whose absentee ballots were improperly rejected aren't disenfranchised, but we are close to the finish line. And we should all be proud of our state's electoral process, and grateful for the dedication of our public servants, from the state canvassing board down to elections officials at the local level."

Meanwhile, the Coleman campaign is attacking the state election officials, saying that they're in the tank for Franken.