(Photo by Aaron Landry/flickr)

Al Franken. Photo: Aaron Landry, Flickr

With nearly 120,00 ballots still to be recounted in the Twin Cities prior to this morning, Al Franken’s lead attorney Mark Elias remains hopeful about his candidate’s chances. “There are very blue areas left to be counted, and the pile yet to be counted is slightly blue in color,” he said during a Monday afternoon conference call with reporters. As of this morning, Hennepin County had some 74,000 ballots left to be counted and Ramsey County had around 43,000 to go go. Team Franken shows Coleman leading by a mere 73 votes, a figure smaller than the 270 tallied by the Star Tribune.

Elias said the campaign would focus on two areas this week: rejected absentee ballots and missing ballots. And, Elias added, in a few days the Franken campaign will announce it’ll be withdrawing some of its ballot challenges. “It doesn’t do us any good to lodge a bunch of challenges that won’t be upheld,” he said. He couldn’t give a ballpark estimate for the number of challenges that will be withdrawn, but he did mark the low end: “It’ll be more than dozens, but I don’t want to go beyond that.”

The Franken campaign is redoubling efforts to get data on absentee voters who had their ballots rejected. Last week, a Ramsey County judge forced election officials to release that county’s data, and now all but nine counties in the state have complied. Team Franken has made a new request to those counties — Carlton, Dakota, Freeborn, Kanabec, Mower, Sherburne, Stearns, Wright and St. Louis (although Duluth has released the information) — and while the reaction “has been largely positive,” Elias says the campaign will “pursue all avenues open to us including legal action.”

Elias said 9,145 absentee ballots were rejected, and the campaign believes most were done so properly. The Secretary of State’s office puts the number of wrongfully rejected absentee ballots at around 500, but Franken’s campaign says that estimate is too conservative, offering up its own estimate of 1,000.

Another focal point of campaign activities will be the issue of missing ballots. Elias says that there have been “numerous instances” where ballots counted on Election Day were not included in the recount. He cited cases in St. Paul, Duluth, Coon Rapids, Hopkins, and elsewhere, offering one case where he says the campaign has “visual evidence of one ballot stuck out of the bottom of the [voting] machine” that had not been counted. Getting specific, he named an Inver Grove Heights precinct the had a 24-vote disparity and another, Woodbury’s Precinct 7, where the votes recounted differed by 29 from those counted on Election Day.

Even if technical or clerical errors are set aside, he said, “several hundred ballots” are missing.

“No recount can be considered accurate or complete until all ballots from lawful voters that are lawfully cast are counted,” Elias said in concluding. “Will Sen. Coleman choose to argue that legally cast votes not be counted? …Can officials look Minnesota in the eyes and say, ‘Your vote doesn’t count’?”

“We’ll fight for the next two weeks to prove the answer is no.”