We're watching today's big meeting of the Minnesota state canvassing board, so you don't have to. And guess what: All things considered, things seem to be going pretty well for Al Franken, though there some very important caveats.

At today's meeting they're reviewing challenged ballots, a process that is expected to last through to the end of the week. The board is looking over ballots that either of the two campaigns have had taken out of the count until now, arguing that it should be counted for themselves or not counted for the opponent for some reason.

Today's meeting is dealing entirely with ballots challenged by Franken, a mix of votes that Al's camp wants to have either prevented from being counted for Coleman, or to be put into his own total when they otherwise wouldn't have been. As such, Norm Coleman is going to pick up votes as most challenges are struck down, putting those ballots back in his column.

But Coleman's pick-up hasn't been that impressive, measured against the expectation that nearly all challenges would be overruled.

With 84 ballots reviewed so far out of over 400 total remaining Franken challenges, Coleman's net gain so far is at just 43 votes, and his pick-up rate has been pretty consistently around the 50% mark all day. When the board gets to Coleman challenges in the coming days, he'll need to keep Franken to a significantly lower pick-up rate than that, in light of the fact that Coleman has more total challenges.

Furthermore, Franken has successfully won some challenges that went against the opinions of the local election officials at the site of the challenge, meaning he's doing better right now than his campaign's methodology would have suggested -- its fundamental assumption was that all challenges would be defeated. And that same model had Franken leading by four votes.

The important caveat here is that we don't know what Coleman's challenges look like. For all we know, he could be just as successful with his challenges as Franken. And who knows what comes next as more and more Franken challenges get reviewed.

Late Update: It's worth noting that over the course of the day some Coleman campaign challenges have accidentally made their way into the mix, and the board has ruled on them, too. The Coleman challenges have all been rejected, but the sample size has been too small to really draw a broad conclusion.