Norm Coleman can still win

Not according to Nate Silver:

What I suspect Coleman did to come up with his list of 650 is something like this:

- Create a database of all ballots that were rejected for a non-matching signature … maybe there were 1500 of these or something statewide.

- Run some algorithm to determine the likelihood of each of these 1500 ballots being a vote for Coleman as based on things like the precinct the ballot was cast in, any information Coleman has about the voter in his voter file, and perhaps even the voter’s name (you can tell more than you’d think about someone based on their first and last name).

- All ballots determined by this algorithm to have a >50% likelihood of being Coleman votes were included on his list … there turned out to be about 650 of these.

To be sure, in undergoing this process, Coleman came across a few ballots that almost certainly were rejected in error; these became the examples that he highlighted to the courts and to the media. But it’s a bit like that old shtick you’ll see in third-rate gangster movies, where the Million Dollar Briefcase turns out to have a few $100s conspicuously placed at the top of the pile concealing a mass of $1s. Coleman has a tip, but no iceberg.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/01/counties-to-coleman-what-part-of-no.html

Too bad Mr. Armbinder calls the DFL candidate “Franklin” halfway through the article.

I’ll share the letter I wrote to Armbinder:

I’m wondering why you mentioned that some absentee ballots were double-counted when poll workers didn’t mark duplicates. This is a theory of the Coleman campaign as to how double counting could have happened, but they haven’t provided any evidence of this. You phrase it as fact, which is misleading. The Franken campaign has an alternate theory, if it happened, that poll workers found some absentee ballots could be read by the scanners and so didn’t get duplicated.

I had the impression you talked to the Coleman campaign, but not to the Franken campaign. Not just the point above, but something else that gives me that impression is your reference to “deft maneuvering around the issue of counting mistakenly rejected absentee ballots”. Franken exercised his veto as Coleman did. They vetoes almost identical numbers of ballots. Franken had asked to the Supreme Court to count all absentee ballots judged by local officials to have been wrongly rejected, he never asked for a veto, and he made an offer to Coleman to have neither campaign use their veto right. It was actually Coleman who maneuvered, maybe not deftly.

Since the Franken take on the issues you wrote about is so different, it seems it would be fair to your readers to give the opposing side, and clarify what is fact and what is assertion by one campaign.