Board Confirms Coleman-Franken Vote: Triggering Recount Wednesday (215 vote lead)

Minnesota Star Tribune ^ | 47 minutes ago

[lewisglad]

The state Canvassing Board today directed that a recount begin tomorrow in the U.S. Senate race between Republican Sen. Norm Coleman and DFLer Al Franken, even as the board considers a last-minute request from the Franken campaign to include rejected absentee and mailed ballots in the initial count.

The board confirmed that, with all the state's 87 counties reporting, Coleman leads Franken by 215 votes out of more than 2.9 million votes cast. After county canvasses showed a margin of 206, Coleman gained an additional 25 votes, and Franken 16, from a post-election audit of voting machines in 205 randomly-selected precincts.

"The report triggers the counting by hand of the four races which will begin tomorrow morning," said Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, chair of the five-member canvassing board. In addition to the Senate race, the results in two state House races and one state Senate race also will be recounted.

Only minutes before the state board began its meeting at 1 p.m., Franken's campaign asked the board in a legal brief to postpone finalizing the count in the Senate race until all precincts were accounted for. At least 49 counties have failed to canvass every precinct, the campaign argues in the brief, and so the board "cannot accept the county reports as the basis for its own certification of the accuracy of the voting totals."

The Franken campaign also took issue with the attorney general's contention Monday that rejected absentee ballots don't have to be considered in the initial count or the recount. The Democratic campaign, citing a U.S. Supreme Court precedent that put a Republican in the White House, said that the case of Bush v. Gore made clear that voters should be treated equally

[Eric in the Ozarks]

I’ll take the RINO 24/7.

[tyke]

There has as yet been no full accounting for the previous adjustments that resulted in the shrinking of Senator Coleman's margin from 725 votes on the morning of November 5 to the 206 votes that preceded any final adjustment.

All that will be irrelevant after the manual recount, so it's not worth wasting any time and effort on it. If it remains as close after the recount, the fury unleashed in the courts by the losing side (whoever that is) will drown out anything that happened before.