Minneapolis officals call off search for missing ballots in Coleman/Franken recount

A development in the recount of ballots in the Senate race between Norm Coleman and Al Franken: MPR’s Tom Scheck reports that the city of Minneapolis has called off its search — or as the conservative National Review Online oddly put it, the “Ponce de Leon-like quest” — for 133 ballots that went missing in Minneapolis’ Precinct 3, Ward 1. Secretary of State Mark Ritchie expressed disappointment that the ballots weren’t found, adding, “There are simple solutions to this. It would have been best to have found it but if it cannot be found then there are simple solutions to the problem created when one packet gets lost.”

One such solution the Franken camp credits Ritchie with proposing: use that precinct’s machine-count for the recount.

Update: City of Minneapolis spokesman Matt Laible tells the Minnesota Independent this afternoon that the city didn’t search its election warehouse for the missing ballots any further after Friday. Instead, the city will send Ritchie the precinct’s Election Day voting-machine tape record of votes as well as the city’s recount figures for ballots there that weren’t lost.