Star Tribune: Franken Will Lead Recount By 48 Votes
In the latest piece of evidence that Al Franken is the favorite to win the Minnesota recount, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune has come up with a new number for where this should end up, based on an analysis of a draft state report: Franken ahead by 48 votes, a margin of 0.00164% out of over 2.9 million cast, and at the upper end of the Franken camp's own claim of a 35-50 vote edge.
The official number from the state, with a few more loose ends settled, should be unveiled at the canvass board meeting tomorrow morning. The reason we don't have it already is that both campaigns lodged thousands of challenges during the recount, which took those votes out of the count. But now the withdrawn challenges are finally being fed back into the count, a process that has taken all weekend and through today.
But this won't be the end. There is still continued legal wrangling over the Coleman camp's claim that enough absentee ballots were accidentally double-counted to put Franken artificially ahead -- which the state Supreme Court is hearing tomorrow -- and the Franken camp's long-running issue about an estimated 1,600 absentee ballots that were never counted to begin with. This thing appears on track to last up to the first week of January, if not longer.
0.00164%?!? I guess we can say that this one is just a wee bit close.
December 22, 2008 6:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ironically this is 2 votes over the 133 lost envelope packet which makes the lost envelope fight moot...since a win by 2 votes or 48 votes is still a win.
Of course this does not include the 1600 absentee ballots where it is believed the final tally will emerge.
Regardless of the percentage that is mostly for parlor games...the bottom line is who wins and who loses and who then takes the seat. Winning by 48, 480, 4800 or 48000 matters little.
December 22, 2008 6:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ah but for Florida in 2000....
Count.The.Votes.
December 22, 2008 7:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
Applause for Nate Silver! Isn't this very close to his prediction over a month ago?
December 22, 2008 8:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
This just goes to show how smart Nate Silver actually is, and how unworthy any of us are to get insight into what he can predict. Here's his original post regarding the recount: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/projection-franken-to-win-recount-by-27.html
December 23, 2008 1:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
I really, really want to see Al Franken in the Senate, for lots of reasons: he's a smart guy, his heart's in the right place, he's not a Republican, and (selfish, I know) it would be fun to see Bill O'Reilly's head explode.
BUT THIS IS A RIDICULOUS WAY TO SETTLE AN ELECTION.
The premise of elections is that "the voters" choose who they want for, say, Senator. The fact of elections this close is that the winner is decided by pure luck. I'm not talking about the COUNTING of the ballots. I'm talking about the casting of them.
If a 2-million vote race is decided by a couple of dozen votes, then I say the winner is mostly a function of what the two dozen least-interested, least-committed voters had for breakfast on election day.
The chance that "the voters" of Minnesota want Al Franken (or Norm Coleman, or the other guy) for Senator THIS month is absolutely unknowable from a couple-of-dozen-vote difference LAST month. A race decided by a 1% or 2% margin is considered tight, but has at least this advantage: it's statistically likely that it would have the same winner if you did it over.
"The voters" can change their mind over time, of course, but that's true even if the snapshot taken on one particular Tuesday in November shows a healthy margin. So I am by no means advocating that we hold elections monthly, to track the "will of the people". But we should at least DETERMINE the "will of the people" on the day we take the snapshot. A couple of dozen votes one way or the other doesn't do that.
Republican operative Ed Rollins once quipped that "Here in America, we hold elections to find out if the polls were right." I would purely love to see that flipped around in this case: could we take a poll to see if the election was right?
--TP
December 22, 2008 9:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
Bill O'Lielly head explosions are totally worth it.
~
December 22, 2008 10:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
Actually, the real problem is deciding the election like this when a third candidate got 15%. This should have gone straight to a runoff; it's certainly more deserving than Georgia.
December 22, 2008 10:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
well, this makes no sense.
December 22, 2008 11:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
well, you can say it all you want but it still won't make any sense.
a win by two dozen votes is as much a function of what the two dozen most interested and best-informed voters desired as it is a function of the two dozen least-interested.
and it doesn't matter if the margin is two dozen or two hundred dozen.
December 23, 2008 10:00 AM | Reply | Permalink
The reason I look at it the other way is this: there are well-informed, totally-committed voters on both sides of any election, close or not. If I lived in MN, I would have made up my mind to vote for Franken the day he announced. He could have paraded down the street naked, and Coleman could have walked on water while healing cripples, and I still would not have changed my mind. Hardly a marginal voter, I. But I bet a dollar that there was some Republican in MN whose position was exactly the reverse of mine. And I bet another dollar that there was some voter in MN who walked into the polls so undecided that s/he flipped a coin to decide who to vote for in the Senate race. I say my vote would have offset the vote of the die-hard Coleman voter, leaving the race to be decided by the coin-flipper.
I'm happy to take a win any way I can get it, but I would be even happier if MN had held a run-off and Al walked away with it, is all I'm saying.
--TP
December 23, 2008 10:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
The recount is not a snapshot of anything, it is the best humanly possible count of the ballots cast on election day by Minnesotans who went to the polls and voted. The scanners on Election Night gave us a +Coleman 215 number, and today the SoS math following recounting of 2.9 million ballots is +48 Franken. Total difference between the two totals, about 273 votes that went from Coleman to Franken in a few cases, but in most cases were recovered votes -- votes for one or another technical reasons were not counted by the scanners. I think when you finally see the total votes cast -- and compare the unofficial scanner count and the hand count, you'll find the "recovered votes" are the greater part of the difference.
And even without adding in what Franken might gain in counting the wrongly rejected absentee ballots to his totals -- 48 votes in one state is probably proportionately greater than the difference in votes between Gore and Bush in Florida -- official count or recounts by the Press and NORC post election -- and Bush claimed it all as we well know.
December 22, 2008 9:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
The voting, not the recount, is what I call the "snapshot". Counting the ballots, by machine or by hand, is akin to developing the picture.
My point is that the thing we're trying to take a picture of -- the will of the people -- is itself fuzzy. If we have to rely on the last few pixels to tell us whether the thing we took a picture of was a donkey or an elephant, I say it might be worth just asking the subject to pose again.
--TP
December 22, 2008 10:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
it isn't a snapshot, it's DNA analysis. the last few votes are precisely what distinguish elephants from donkeys.
December 23, 2008 10:09 AM | Reply | Permalink
The goal of the process is to count every vote as carefully as practicable. That's not a ridiculous way to settle an election, it's a rational one. The fact that the opinions of the electorate change over time doesn't make this any less true. Nor does the fact that this election is especially close.
I can only surmise that you are proposing a system like the one used to elect the Pope, in which votes are repeatedly taken until a certain margin emerges. The problem with this is that it takes an enormous amount of effort to process all the votes in an entire state, and there's simply no guarantee that voters would shift their opinions quickly enough. Or that they won't simply shift them back next month.
December 22, 2008 11:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm so happy. If for no other reason, this is enough for me to want Franken:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=susZ2ceEHwk
December 23, 2008 12:08 AM | Reply | Permalink