Challenged Ballots

More Votes Keep Turning Up In Franken's Favor

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The never-ending recount continues today with 171 new ballots discovered in Ramsey county, 91 went to Franken, 54 to Coleman and the rest went to other candidates.  The found ballots were from a machine that broke down early on Election Day in a precinct in Maplewood.  The machine was replaced, but the ballots in question wren't fed through again, according to Joe Mansky, Ramsey County elections chief.

The discovery of these new ballots underscores the importance of the recount, which has been likened to watching paint dry in it's tedium.  The found ballots still put Coleman in the lead, but by a small margin.  The AP reports:

Through Tuesday, Coleman's margin was 303, a comparison made possible because counties are reporting recount numbers that compare directly with their precincts' Nov. 4 results. However, those numbers could still shift as the last counties complete their work by Friday.

"That's why we do the recount," Mansky said. Read more

Recount Resumes, Razor-thin Margins Predicted

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Who would've known that counting could be so complicated?  Nate Silver, the geek superstar of this election season is predicting how this race will go down.  Take a look at the formula he uses in his site FiveThirtyEight.com, I'm still trying to wrap my mind around some of the ideas he's throwing out there but I think it goes something like this:  The challenged votes are really complicating things for Al Franken.

Using regression analysis, Silver predicts a Franken victory.

This regression is a bit difficult to interpret, particularly with the presence of all the interaction terms, but the key intuition is as follows. Suppose that the number of challenges is zero -- as will happen once the state canvassing board finishes considering all such challenges in December. In this case, all terms in the regression equation reduce to zero, except for the constant term and t, which is Franken's share of the two-way vote in that precinct. Read more

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