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.