challenged ballots

Minnesota’s U.S. Senate recount has ratcheted up since Election Day to become an inscrutable form of inside baseball. But Tuesday’s proceedings of the State Canvassing Board made even baseball seem easy. Pitchers adjust their pitches based on the umpires’ first few calls, while the first day’s decisions on challenged ballots went by before campaigns began to adjust to the board’s way of ruling. Now both sides are mixing up their pitches like baseball aces, adding and subtracting from their challenged-ballot piles.

It can’t be coincidence that the Al Franken for Senate campaign pledged today to reduce its pending ballot challenges in the ongoing statewide Senate recount to fewer than 500 by Tuesday. On Friday, Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie estimated that the State Canvassing Board could only evaluate 1,000 such ballots in the four days it [...]

The main story so far in Minnesota’s statewide election recount — besides incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman’s continuing slim lead over Democratic challenger Al Franken and the role of wrongly rejected absentee ballots — has been how the unexpectedly large numbers of ballot challenges from both campaigns have affected the recount’s running vote tally. By questioning election officials on 27 of every 10,000 ballots cast for either man, the campaigns have temporarily removed nearly 6,000 votes from the official recount totals, leaving Coleman in command (for the moment) of a 344-vote advantage. But take one statistic from Monday’s recount action — Coleman challenged 35 more ballots than did Franken — and extrapolate it across eight days of a recount that’s now nine-tenths done, and you can show, on paper at least, how Coleman’s ballot-challenge lead could account for his lead in the running tally of overall votes.

Forget the comparisons to Florida. Think the Great Pyramids instead.
Minnesota’s U.S. Senate recount is so refined, so elegant, so perfect that even its greatest excess — the unbridled, tit-for-tat ballot-challenges by both the Al Franken and Norm Coleman campaigns — has been raised to an art form. Monday’s recount action may have been replete with the apparent [...]

Even with limited activity Saturday in Minnesota’s statewide U.S. Senate recount, Al Franken and Norm Coleman managed to challenge another 368 ballots. The stack that the State Canvassing Board will have to review is now 1,893 ballots high, after two-thirds of the ballots that were cast Nov. 4 have been recounted. Unless the candidates’ campaigns change course, the challenges are on pace to reach nearly 3,000 ballots by the time the recount ends.

Simple math tells us that if the Al Franken forces and the Norm Coleman camp keep ramping up the ballot challenges, they’ll reach a combined total of 1,732 challenged ballots by the end of Minnesota’s U.S. Senate recount. That’s if each campaign continues to increase its number of challenges in the neighborhood of 140 per [...]

Two days into Minnesota’s statewide election recount, Al Franken and Sen. Norm Coleman are challenging ballots at a pace that could end up sending more than 1,700 disputed votes to the state’s Canvassing Board to sort out: Coleman’s crowd has challenged 374 so far, Franken’s 360. As that number grows, the margin between the rival candidates has shrunk, with 42.33 percent of ballots already recounted. New figures from the Minnesota Secretary of State’s office indicate that Coleman’s lead now stands at 129. It’s only a snapshot in a process that hasn’t yet reached the halfway mark, but it’s a snapshot in which the vaunted Coleman “victory” appears to be fading fast.