Minnesota Senate Recount (Update)

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Franken had a good day today:

Franken unexpectedly picked up 37 votes due to a combined machine malfunction and human error on Election Day that left 171 Maplewood ballots safe, secure but uncounted until Tuesday's final day of recounting in Ramsey County.

Plus the Franken campaign claimed earlier (before the 171 ballots were found) that they were within 50 votes by their count. So now they should be under 20 votes behind, with about 180,000 votes still to be recounted, and then 6000 challenged ballots to be looked at.

Coleman has now challenged 183 more ballots than Franken, but there's just no way to tell how valid either side's challenges are. With almost 6000 ballots challenged so far, mathematical predictions are pretty much worthless at this point.

12/2 11:00 PM: 93% in. Coleman leads by 303. 6003 votes challenged.
12/1 11:00 PM: 92% in. Coleman leads by 340. 5952 votes challenged.
11/29 10:00 AM: 88% in. Coleman by 282. 5623 votes challenged.
11/26 1:00 AM: 82% in. Coleman by 231. 3626 votes challenged.
11/25 8:00 PM: 79% in. Coleman by 213. 3166 votes challenged.
11/24 9:30 PM: 77% in. Coleman by 210
11/22 10:30 PM: 68% in. Coleman by 180
11/21 9:30 PM: 64% in. Coleman by 120
11/20 9:30PM: 46% in. Coleman by 136
11/19 PM: 21% in. Coleman by 174

Remember one important point: There are two types of challenged ballots. The first, we'll call Type A, are ballots which would have gone to the opposing side, but are challenged for some reason. These ballots get subtracted from the ongoing count - this is mostly what is causing the loss of votes for both candidates.

But there's another, we'll call Type B. These are ballots which would have gone to the "no vote" pile, but are challenged by a candidate to put them in their own pile. So Franken's challenged ballots consists of former Coleman ballots that Franken thinks should be "no vote" (or maybe even Franken), and former "no vote" ballots he wants in the Franken pile. There's no way to tell how many of each type are in the challenge numbers, which makes it really difficult to tell how the challenge numbers will work out.

CBS 4 out of the Twin Cities now has a precinct-by precinct map of the recount.