Minnesota Senate Recount Canvassing Board - Day Two
I’m really not watching this constantly, I swear.
But kinda.
Team Franken has been withdrawing challenges throughout the day, with an apparent rise in goodwill towards the Franken campaign.
The lawyers are rarely allowed to talk, but Franken’s counsel seems to be getting less snippy responses when he tries to intercede.
In addition, yesterday’s challenges seemed to be largely Franken challenges on Coleman votes, many of which were rejected.
So Coleman’s total is reflecting a large number of votes that were in his pile at the end of the first Election Day count. (Similarly, Franken’s total should jump once they start looking at Coleman challenges on Franken votes.)
I don’t know how the order of these challenges is determined, but today there seems to be a larger number of votes that were deemed overvotes in the recount that are now being determined for Franken. He’s definitely picking up some votes.
That’s a pretty simple statement, but there’s an important distinction:
- Coleman’s increasing total is largely the result of the reallocation of votes he already had on Election Day;
- Franken’s increasing total is reflective of new votes, which will actually cut into Coleman’s lead.
Obviously, we can expect to see some of this happen for Coleman when his challenges are reviewed.
The real question is which campaign has more of these vote-gaining challenges.
Last month, 538 took a look at the four different types of challenges and the likely results. (The challenged vote totals have changed significantly since Silver wrote this up, so his assessments may be invalid at this point.)
In crazy Minnesota voter news - someone took the time to draw a perfectly straight line down the middle of all the ovals in every race, except president. As in, they clearly used a straight edge.
Apparently someone also wrote, “God help us” on their ballot. Why can’t people just go in and vote?
Here’s the one they just looked at. For serious.
Someone else filled in the oval next to every presidental candidate except for Obama and Nader.
Voting by the masses may or may not be an overrated idea.
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