The Minnesota Supreme Court has granted a request from the Franken and Coleman campaigns to approve a framework for counting wrongly-rejected absentee ballots -- including an extension of the process into the first week of January, guaranteeing that this recount will last a little while longer.

The reason for the extension itself is that the campaigns and local officials needed to find ways to preserve ballot secrecy in counties that might have only one or two rejected absentees, choosing to forward all the accepted ballots on to a general statewide pile that keeps the origins of individual votes private. But the process still has the peculiarities inherent in the court's decision from last week.

The court's latest order specifies that local officials sort out ballots that don't qualify under any of the four legal reasons for rejecting a ballot, and then still gives the campaigns final approval over the inclusion of any individual envelopes. This would mean campaigns are faced with ballots that truly appear to be legal, but still have the unilateral power to reject them.

It still seems like the most logical outcome is for hardly any votes to be counted at all.