Pitchers can adjust their pitches based on the umpires’ first few calls. The campaigns of Democrat Al Franken and U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman sat through about 160 of the board’s rulings Tuesday before signaling that they’d be adjusting their piles of challenged ballots accordingly.

“I sure hope that if you’re adding them, you’re also subtracting them,” said Ramsey County District Judge Edward Cleary.

U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman’s attorney, Tony Trimble, told reporters after the Tuesday meeting, which kicked off four days of meetings by the board, that the campaign would return “200-some” to its ballot-challenge pile, but also would remove some others. “We’ve restored challenges … simply because the board has now indicated how they rule on several different types of marking,” Trimble said. “And with that, of course, we have to adjust.”

On Wednesday morning, the Canvassing Board’s proceedings took the air of a baseball game in which both sides were settling in. Democrat Al Franken’s 80 additional withdrawals were much in evidence as the board sped through ballots the campaign had challenged in Minneapolis, including many dispatched within seconds of a cry of “withdrawn” from the Franken bench.

“Thank you. It’s wonderful to get withdrawals,” Ritchie remarked Wednesday morning after Franken forces withdrew another ballot as it came up before the board.

It wasn’t clear how late additions and subtractions affected the combined number of challenged ballots the board must work through this week. “We’re still south of 1,000,” Trimble promised, in the geographic-numerical nomenclature the Coleman camp has adopted, despite subtle suggestions of the American South — Florida, to be specific.

UPDATE: The Norm Coleman camp says they’ll trim their ballot challenges to “somewhere south of 1,000.” 

With two unanimous votes going its way at the board’s Friday meeting but rival U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman petitioning the state Supreme Court for delay, the Franken campaign is eager to please the board and help things proceed according to plan. One hitch: Tit-for-tat mass withdrawals to bring the challenged-ballot count down from a combined high of 6,655 to a manageable number may be welcome and all, but even processing the withdrawals means extra work for dog-tired election officials.

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.

The shelf life of such computations, however — like the shelf life of the candidates’ ballot challenges on which they’re based — is limited. There’s a Dec. 5 deadline for counties to complete their recount responsibilities and a Dec. 16 date for the State Canvassing Board to begin aggregating the counties’ handiwork, including the critical task of sorting out the challenged ballots.

In the meantime, the canvassing board may also decide what if anything it will do about examining an estimated 12,000 rejected absentee ballots for legitimate votes that should have been counted.

Most counties are already done with their parts in the state’s recount, but some have yet to start. On Tuesday only Hennepin, Ramsey and Dodge counties will be recounting, according to The Uptake, which closely tracks counties’ efforts. On Wednesday, Rock, Wright, Scott and Winona counties will begin their recounts.

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 messiness of lost-and-found ballots and the seeming ugliness of surly officials sending challengers into tears, but it ended on a grace note of pure, mathematical-political-electoral beauty.

With more than 2 million ballots having been recounted (three-quarters of the 2.9 million that were cast on Nov. 4), the ballots that the Franken and Coleman camps have challenged are as near to being equal in number as near-equal can be: Coleman, 1,401; Franken 1,400.

As the ballot challengers work in harmony with the music of the spheres, the unchallenged ballots continued playing the same dirge on Monday that we’ve heard for weeks now: there’s an advantage for Coleman in the low three-digits. Today the gap between Coleman and Franken is 172, according to figures from Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie’s office.

In an election that the State Canvassing Board found was within 215 votes (in incumbent U.S. Sen. Coleman’s favor) after the initial canvass, the rival camps are now running virtually neck-and-neck in the amount of challenged ballots: Coleman has challenged 948; Franken, 945. The challenged ballots aren’t counted in the final total until the Canvassing Board reviews them.

Meanwhile, the margin between the candidates continued to hover between 100 and 200 votes, standing at 167 (with Coleman still in the lead) as of 8 p.m. Saturday — when the office of Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie released its official figures for the day. (The Star Tribune keeps a different set of numbers based on its own information gathered before and after 8 p.m. at recount sites across the state.)

It’s so close that Democrats have asked voters overseas to call their local election offices in Minnesota to find out if their absentee ballots were rejected — and if they were, to relay that to the party immediately. The State Canvassing Board meets Wednesday to discuss the question of counting improperly rejected absentee ballots.

(Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie predicts 1,500 challenged ballots, and fivethirtyeight.com’s Nate Silver estimates roughly 1,800. But since every campaign challenger at every recount site represents an independent variable, I think my guess is as good as theirs.)

More complicated math, working with the rate of increase rather than the hard-number jump, suggests the combined total could hit 2,518. That’s if each campaign were to continue to become increasingly picky over the next two days — at the same percentage rate of increase they showed from Day One to Day Two.

For Franken, the day-over-day increase so far is 42 percent, which if repeated on Day Three and Day Four of a projected four-day recount, would lead to a total of 1,233 challenges.

For Coleman, who had a 44 percent increase from Day One to Day Two, the grand total would be 1,285 challenged ballots, if he were to keep increasing his challenged ballots by 44 percent each day. Drilling down, that means he would challenge 373 on Day Three. And on Day Four, Coleman’s daily challenged ballot count would be – hold on to your hat, Nate Silver! – 538.

Al Franken (Photo: Aaron Landry) and Norm Coleman (Photo: WDCpix.com)

Two days into Minnesota’s statewide election recount, Al Franken and U.S. 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. Each campaign claims the other’s challenges are frivolous, but frivolous or not, they are both making them at a rate that’s increasing rather than slacking off, as some said would happen. The challenged-ballot count remains neck-and-neck: Coleman’s crowd has challenged 374 so far, Franken’s 360.

As the number of challenged ballots grows — it’s at 734 combined as of today, with 42.33 percent of ballots cast Nov. 4 now recounted — the margin between the rival candidates shrinks. Figures from the Minnesota Secretary of State’s office, which is posting updates every night at 8 p.m., now indicate that Coleman’s lead over Franken has shrunk again and 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.

The picture that’s emerging is of a recounted total that remains a near-tie, with the election hanging on the judgment of the five state Canvassing Board members’ evaluation of the growing stack of challenged ballots.

Tonight’s totals, which don’t include the 734 challenged ballots, have Norm Coleman at 534,687 votes (212 fewer votes than the original count indicated from the same ballots) and Al Franken with 494,930 votes (126 fewer than on the first count of the same ballots). Subtracting those votes lost in the course of the recount so far brings the pre-recount gap of 215 down to a 129 margin that currently favors Coleman.
Note: The Star Tribune has slightly different numbers based on the secretary of state’s figures as well as on reports the Strib gathers from individual counties or recount sites after 8 p.m. With 46 percent of ballots recounted statewide, the Strib puts the gap between Franken and Coleman at 136, with greater numbers of challenged ballots for each: Coleman, 409; Franken, 414.