Not really. I lied. I made up the bread and auto part. The ballot part - who made that one up? MPR reports it as true.
Election officials discovered 171 ballots that were not counted on Election Day and Democrat Al Franken picked up an extra 37 votes once all the new ballots were tallied.
St. Paul, Minn. — The 171 ballots were found in Maplewood's 6th Precinct. Ramsey County Elections Director Joe Mansky said they found the ballots in a voting machine that broke down on Election Day. He said the machine was replaced but the judges forgot to feed to feed through the new ballot counter.
"The 171 ballots were already in the ballot box, so those votes did not get recorded on the tape that we were using," Mansky said.
Mansky said the ballots were always secure and were not lost. When the votes were tallied, Al Franken gained 91 votes from the batch, and Norm Coleman picked up 54 votes.
[...] Finding the votes so late in the process concerns the Secretary of State's office. Deputy Secretary of State Jim Gelbmann said on two occasions his office urged local elections officials to account for all of the ballots before they started their recounts. Gelbmann wants to know why the mistake happened and why it took so long to catch. He also wants Ramsey County to make sure the number of people who voted in that precinct matches up with the number of ballots cast.
Okay. Same post, MPR also reports:
Scott and Wright counties will start recounting their votes in Minnesota's U.S. Senate race today. With just three days until the recounting is expected to end, 93 percent of the vote has been recounted. The campaigns for Republican Norm Coleman and Democrat Al Franken have challenged 6,000 ballots.
Better call ghost busters, if they have to open up any more voting machines. Who knows what in those counties might be found? Stolen cargo, Somali pirates, bones and maps to buried treasure - we can only guess. Perhaps some lost Georgia runoff ballots, perhaps all for Martin, enough to cut the Chambliss lead to 56.5%?