(Photo by Aaron Landry/Flickr)

(Photo by Aaron Landry/Flickr)

Democrat Al Franken will not lose the lead he gained Friday in the Minnesota Senate recount, his campaign’s recount attorney said today. Franken’s margin over Republican U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman, now in the low three-digits in many media estimates, will stand between 35 and 50 votes next Tuesday, attorney Marc Elias told reporters during a rare weekend press conference. By then the State Canvassing Board expects to have added back thousands of withdrawn ballot challenges to its tally of votes in the Nov. 4 election that were so far not included in official running recount totals.

The pronouncement that Franken will soon be Minnesota’s senator-elect is not just the campaign talking; it’s the campaign’s math talking. Franken’s figures always “assumed those [challenged] ballots would end up in the tally of the candidate for whom each one was originally called,” as a campaign statement put it. “[T]he internal count can predict the result of that work with certainty: a 35-50 vote lead for Franken.”

In a tone that sounded simultaneously tired, sober and certain, Elias said he is confident that Franken’s lead will also withstand the statewide canvass of wrongly rejected absentee votes that the Minnesota Supreme Court ordered counties to conduct by Dec. 31. Indeed, that tabulation of as many as 1,600 uncounted but properly cast votes is widely expected to favor Franken.

Elias dismissed Coleman campaign motions filed Friday that ask the state Supreme Court to order the canvassing board not to count or certify a recount that contains duplicate ballots which Coleman alleges may have been counted twice. Elias said Coleman’s concern about duplicate ballots represented a reversal from its earlier position, a departure from an agreement the campaigns had on how to deal with duplicates, an effort to prolong and cast doubt on the recount process, and a sign of panic from a campaign that now sees it will lose. Local elections officials create duplicate ballots when voters’ original ballots that get too damaged or soiled to be read by vote-counting machines.