This is crazy. Yes it was a very close election. But Coleman was ahead by 700+ votes on election night. Ever since then, the re-count and additional absentee ballots only added to Franken’s total, never adding to Coleman.
Sad to say, Republicans have to win elections by bigger margins so that re-counts and newly discovered ballots can’t be used to change an election result.
So, to get from about 700 ahead to 312 behind was a swing of about 1000 votes. It’s probably easy for the Dems. to find that many extra votes somewhere.
Remember in 2004, how the Democrats wanted to make Ohio’s vote re-count into another Florida? Bush was ahead on election night by about 120,000 votes, and the final count after they did their provisional count and re-count showed Bush ahead by about 89,000 votes. That was a swing of about 30,000 statewide in Ohio. It wasn’t enough to change the outcome that year, but in a close election it would have been plenty.
Bottom line is that Republicans have to win by many thousands of votes to prevent the vote manipulation that can happen.
I'm sure that fact is being factored in to future election results.
The only races allowed to appear close will be those where the "Republican" is a Democrat infiltrator RINO that they need some of to give the facade of a democratic 2 party system.