Rachel and Dave, PiPress' tag-team to report on the Al & Norm sweepstakes, write:
After the recount, Republican Sen. Norm Coleman, who has led Democrat Al Franken in vote tallies by the narrowest of margins since Nov. 5, kept the lead. With 99.93 percent of ballots counted, Coleman had a 192-vote lead in the ballots recounted. He led by 215 before the recount.
But his lead doesn't include thousands of ballots the campaigns challenged, the bulk of the improperly rejected absentee ballots or 133 votes on missing ballots in Minneapolis.
The challenged ballots may be the most significant of those.
All told, the Franken and Coleman campaigns have taken 6,655 ballots out of the count by challenging an elections official's determination of the votes they contain.
The campaigns have asked the secretary of state's office to withdraw some of those challenges and assign those ballots to the proper candidate — Franken withdrew 633; Coleman withdrew 650 — and expect to withdraw more.
Still, given the slim lead, those challenged ballots could determine the winner.
Ballot challenges:
"Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;" ...
How to decide??? It's the challenged ballots and litigating about them, throwing it to the Senate to seat somebody or to order another election, or, what?
Coleman, ahead in the recount gets choice of weapons?
______UPDATE_______
Same PiPress report on the way the recount ends, not with a bang but a whimper.
But 133 votes from Minneapolis Ward 3, Precinct 1, were tallied on Election Day and weren't available for the recount. That's because an envelope with the ballots containing those votes has likely been lost, setting off the Magnificent Missing Ballot Envelope Hunt in the final act of the Muddled Minnesota Senate Recount.
Led by Minneapolis elections director Cindy Reichert, a dozen people — city workers, campaign representatives and lawyers and nonpartisan observers — examined every inch of the 8,000-square-foot elections warehouse in Northeast Minneapolis on Friday, looking for the missing ballot envelope.
They had a model of what they wanted to find: Deputy Secretary of State Jim Gelbmann had taken a white, 8.5-by-17-inch envelope, counted out 133 blank ballots, placed them inside and scribbled in black pen: "Size of envelope we are searching for."
The seekers sorted through trash, rolled ballot machines back and forth, opened cardboard boxes, wrestled with piles of large plastic sheets and even climbed atop a 6-foot-high butte of voting booth suitcases.
"We've looked in every logical place," Reichert said. "Now, we're looking in the illogical places."
"Onward," Cindy said, in a steadfast fashion, "Onward to the illogical places ..."
