Free Republic

(ABC 6 NEWS) -- We're nearing the end of the historic Senate recount between Senator Norm Coleman and challenger Al Franken. Election officials are now turning their focus to the absentee ballots. Starting this morning, volunteers will begin to count how many absentee ballots were wrongly rejected due to an administrative error. Then it will be up the state canvassing board to decide whether or not to include those ballots into the recount. The board is scheduled to meet on Friday. For the moment, Coleman leads Franken by 687 votes.

The Missing Dirt On Arianna Huffington The New Yorker published its profile of Arianna Huffington. Though disappointingly far from the juicy takedown we hoped for, it does contain a few interesting nuggets. We learn, for example, that the Republican-divorcée-turned-internet-publisher bizarrely "hides" all three of her BlackBerrys in her bathroom at night, even though she lives only with a housekeeper and her two daughters. Her gay ex-husband Michael Huffington elaborates on how she knew of his interest in men before their marriage, saying, "in my Houston town house I sat down with her and told her that I had dated women...

But not how you think. As the recount came to close across the state, Minneapolis searched high and low for 133 ballots ... that are still missing. The hand recount of 2.9 million ballots in Minnesota's U.S. Senate race in stations across the state ended Friday with more question marks than exclamation points. After three weeks of painstaking and sometimes draining counting, the result of the Nov. 4 election is not much clearer than it was Nov. 5. "I have maintained vehemently that it is impossible to know who, among those two candidates, is winning," Secretary of State Mark Ritchie...

Republicans Fear Al Franken Stealing Votes Sunday, November 9, 2008 8:03 PM By: Phil Brennan With votes for comedian Al Franken mysteriously appearing out of thin air, steadily narrowing the gap between him and Sen. Norm Coleman, the stench of corruption becomes more and more pungent. *Snip* According to the Coleman forces, the ballots were not counted on Election Day and were not kept in sealed boxes. It says the request was made amid "increasing questions about unexplained and improbable shifts in vote counts." The most recent vote tally has Coleman leading Franken by only a couple hundred votes. A...

The recount has swung back and forth between the two men, with batches of uncounted ballots being discovered here and there as well as clerical errors changing the totals. With the recount virtually complete on Friday, Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie said Coleman led Franken by 787 votes. Local newspapers put Coleman's margin at about 200 votes, tallying ballots that had previously been challenged.

With all but one precinct re-counted in the Minnesota Senate race, Franken campaign attorney Marc Elias is claiming Franken leads Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) by four votes. The number from Franken's internal tally does not include the Minneapolis precinct where 133 ballots went missing. The Franken count includes the thousands of disputed ballots that both campaigns objected to during the recount process.

Democrat Al Franken has launched a door-to-door campaign in Minnesota to gather affidavits from voters and use them to defeat GOP incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman. Franken presented on Thursday 62 affidavits from Minnesota citizens who stated that their votes for Franken were improperly rejected. In past elections, such affidavits have all but forced election officials to count the votes in question. Franken’s maneuver comes on the eve of a crucial meeting of the five-member Canvassing Board to decide the fate of absentee ballots. Local election officials throughout the state ruled that more than 12,000 absentee ballots were incorrectly filled out...