Recount Day 9: Challenges fall amid reports of newly found ballots

The campaigns of Democrat Al Franken and Republican Norm Coleman slowed their ballot challenges on Tuesday in Minnesota’s U.S. Senate election recount, setting aside only 60 ballots of the 36,238 recounted for future review by the State Canvassing Board. That’s a drop to a (one day only) rate of fewer than 17 challenges per 10,000 cast for either man (compared to 17 per 10,000 overall) on a day in which recount teams only got through 1.5 percent of the total number of ballots cast on Nov. 4.

Tuesday’s stats got a bit lost amid news that long-lost ballots turned up in Ramsey County, but they suggest that Secretary of State Mark Ritchie’s message about reining in challenges may have gotten through to the rival camps.

The official state figures for the day put Coleman ahead of Franken by 303 votes — a gap that has been shrinking and widening since being pegged at 215 by the State Canvassing Board so they could authorize a statewide recount as required by state law in such tight races. As the recount nears its end, it remains deceptive to draw conclusions even from the now-substantial fraction of the total ballots cast that have been recounted so far. The nearly 93 percent of ballots cast on Nov. 4 that recount crews have since given a second look represent a slightly skewed sample of the overall  vote. At first that seemed to be to Coleman’s advantage, since more of the ballots that happened to have been reviewed during the recount’s first days favored him, but that imbalance has now swung to Franken. Slightly more of the ballots that had been recounted as of Tuesday night were originally counted as Franken votes, and the recount’s running total also slightly favored Franken for the moment.

The recount’s drama quotient should increase as the recount progresses towards a Friday deadline for counties to complete their counts. But U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss’s run-off election victory in Georgia on Tuesday means a Franken win could not give Democrats a 60-vote majority in the Senate. Will that inspire CNN’s Anderson Cooper to pull a 360 on his rumored pilgrimage to Wright County’s recount this week? We’ll just have to wait to see.