“We have reason to be optimistic,” recount attorney Marc Elias told reporters at an afternoon press conference. “We are picking up votes across the state.”

The candidate himself — seldom seen locally since recount gears began turning — shared that view, according to communications director Andy Barr. “Al is cautiously optimistic,” Barr said.

Describing the stacks of ballots recounted by hand Wednesday as a “slightly redder” subset of the 2.9 million ballots cast on Election Day, Elias said the campaign believes Franken closed the gap with incumbent Republican Sen. Norm Coleman by more than the secretary of state’s official count of 43 votes.

Elias also claimed to have seen local examples of the same phenomenon in Hennepin, Ramsey and St. Louis counties, where Franken gained on Coleman in recounts of areas where the Nov. 4 election results show the Democrat didn’t run as well as in the remaining (yet unrecounted) precincts in those counties.

Elias said he was relying on internal campaign tallies of the recount’s Day One results, including reports from counties whose results came in too late at night to be part of the state’s official count at 8 p.m. Wednesday.

Elias also said that anecdotal evidence received Wednesday about frivolous challenges has emerged as a pattern. “There are clearly a significant number of instances of challenging clear Franken votes,” he said. “We have seen examples of challengers that clearly are not meritorious and will not be upheld by the Canvassing Board.”

Elias granted that some of the frivolous challenges he alleges could be due to first-day jitterson the part of Coleman workers. He also conceded that Franken’s challengers — who on Wednesday demanded that nearly as many ballots be set aside for Canvassing Board review as did the Coleman challengers — may have also been overzealous. “It’s a very good question,” he said. “It’s part of our review.”

Competing with the recount for the campaign’s attention, Elias said, were the newly arriving lists of voters whose absentee ballots had been rejected by county election officials. That flow of info follows a Ramsey County District Court ruling Wednesday ordering Ramsey Countyto provide any such lists to the Franken camp.

Barr said about three dozen counties had so far followed suit. But the data isn’t uniformly presented, Barr said, so the campaign wasn’t sure what it had yet and wouldn’t state what it plans to do with the lists. On Tuesday, the state Canvassing Board promised to consider whether it would conduct its own review of rejected absentee ballots.

Barr expressed satisfaction that the Coleman camp’s claims of victory were being taken with a grain of salt even in GOP circles. “It’s becoming increasingly clear that national Republicans are beginning to realize that Sen. Coleman has not been determined the winner of the race and are becoming concerned,” he said, noting in particular that some Republicans are already suggestions of other lines of work for Coleman, such as the post of Republican National Committee chairman.