Recount Resumes, Razor-thin Margins Predicted

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. We are thus left with the following:

franken_net = t * 8.922 - 3.622

Now, we can attempt to solve this equation at the statewide level. When we plug in a t of .499956 -- Franken was picked on just slightly very less than half of the ballots during the initial count -- we get a value for franken_net of .837. That is, Franken will gain a net of .837 votes for every 10,000 cast. With a total of 2,885,555 ballots having been recorded in the initial count, this works out to a projected gain of 242 votes for Franken statewide. Since Norm Coleman led by 215 votes in the initial count, this suggests that Franken will win by 27 votes once the recount process is complete (including specifically the adjudication of all challenged ballots).

Now I wish I had stayed awake in Math Class, but you can look at his numbers, see if you can make some sense out of this.  I trust Mr. Nate's projection, he did call the Presidential elections after all.