Sometimes when the news leaves you seeing floaters before your eyes, all you have to do is wait a day or two for things to come into focus. On Friday, former Secretary of State (and freshly elected state representative) Mary Kiffmeyer found a range of faults with the Senate election recount between Al Franken and former U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman, as conducted by her successor in the secretary of state post, Mark Ritchie. Kiffmeyer complained to the St. Paul Legal Ledger that votes were counted that shouldn’t have been:

“If there are wrongly rejected [ballots], then you also have to accept the fact that there are wrongly accepted [ballots],” she said. “And they never went there, they never went into wrongly accepted. They didn’t take a global look at everything.” She acknowledges that doing so would have meant opening a huge can of worms. “Once you stray off that,” she said, “where do you quit once you open that door?”

Seemed like a hypothetical question at the time, but Sunday’s Star Tribune makes it sound not moot at all:

In their fight to overturn the U.S. Senate recount, Norm Coleman’s legal team has begun pressing some Minnesota counties for documents on hundreds of thousands of ballots that were not previously disputed … casting a much wider net for other mistakes that could cost Franken votes. The latest requests, dealing with approved absentee ballots and precinct voter rosters, are frustrating some counties.

The Strib report continues:

“You’re talking 30,000, 40,000 pages of documents,” said Stearns County elections chief Dave Walz, referring to his county alone. Joe Mansky, Ramsey County’s election director, said the county has received requests for copies of “over 200,000 pieces of paper” from the campaigns.

The story doesn’t detail just how globally Coleman’s team is looking into Kiffmeyer’s can of worms, but that too may become clearer in a day or two.