With a recount looking more and more likely, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie has laid out a plan for the canvasing operations. The recount of the governor’s race is set for Nov. 29, which will follow the Canvassing Board’s decision on whether a recount will happen. That board is scheduled to meet on Nov. 23. Leading up to those meetings, counties are prepping for the recount and dealing with an enormous number of data practices request from the campaigns. DFLer Mark Dayton leads Republican Tom Emmer by more than 8,700 votes.

Hennepin County conducted a post-election mandatory review and found that Dayton picked up three votes and Emmer lost 2 votes, for a net gain of 5 votes for Dayton. The process is part of a mandated review that all counties must undergo and is a hand count of random precincts. The county checked 13 precincts and 12,500 votes.

Ramsey County’s review showed there was no change from election night results.

St. Louis County, which has been the target of a lawsuit by the Emmer campaign and the Republican Party of Minnesota after the county said it would take at least 14 days to fill a request for voting machine tapes, summary statements, ballot security information, revisions to reported election night results, photocopies of all accepted and rejected absentee ballot information, names and addresses of everyone who applied for an absentee ballot, voter registration information, names of election judges, election night incident reports, and all information provided to the Dayton campaign. The county has announced that it is in negotiations to provide documents.

The duo also sued Pine County. Officials for the county told the Star Tribune on Tuesday they didn’t receive the data requests and only learned of the lawsuit in the local paper.

“I don’t think [the GOP and Emmer] handled it as well as they could have,” Pine County auditor Cathy Clemmer told Strib Eric Roper. “It would have been much simpler to pick up the phone and say, ‘Gee whiz, we haven’t heard from you. Did you get our e-mail?’ Instead of going directly to a lawsuit.”

While the statewide recount nears, three Minnesota House races are also at a razor thin margin. In District 15B, Republican St. Cloud State professor King Banaian has a 10-vote lead over DFLer Carol Lewis. In District 25B, Republican Kelby Woodard leads DFL Rep. David Bly by 31 votes and, in District 27A which contains Albert Lea, Republican Rich Murray leads Rep. Robin Brown by 57 votes. All three are within the 0.5 percent margin that triggers an automatic recount. Those recounts are scheduled for Nov. 29.

In an editorial on Tuesday, the Star Tribune questioned whether the 0.5 percent margin is too high a threshold to trigger a recount, noting that legislators had tried to scale it back to 0.25 percent.

“Had their bills become law, Gov.-elect Dayton likely would be announcing his top commissioner appointees this week,” the paper wrote. “Legislators of both parties would begin crafting legislation, knowing whose signature their bills would require in order to be enacted. And Minnesotans would at least be assured that their government was gearing up to tackle the biggest state fiscal crisis since the 1930s.”

The Republican Party of Minnesota and Tom Emmer’s gubernatorial campaign filed a civil suit against Pine and St. Louis counties on Friday saying the two have been too slow in getting requested documents related to the election.

But county officials and the recount team for Democrat Mark Dayton said the requests and timeline made by the Emmer campaign are burdensome and unreasonable. At the same time, the Dayton campaign is pressuring his Republican rival to forgo the recount following few changes in the vote total during the canvassing process.

Emmer and the GOP asked the counties on Nov. 4 to “immediately” turn over voting machine tapes, summary statements, ballot security information, revisions to reported election night results, photocopies of all accepted and rejected absentee ballot information, names and addresses of everyone who applied for an absentee ballot, voter registration information, names of election judges, election night incident reports, and all information provided to the Dayton campaign.

St. Louis County said it could not complete the request within 14 days and Pin County did not respond to the Emmer campaign, according to documents filed with the court.

“The unacceptable foot dragging of St. Louis and Pine Counties cannot persist,” said GOP chair Tony Sutton. “The Emmer for Governor campaign and the Republican Party of Minnesota should not have to go to court to get counties to respond to data practices requests in a timely manner. We will continue to pursue any counties that do not promptly meet their legal obligations during this process. Minnesotans deserve better.”

But, Dayton’s lawyers and at least one county elections official say that Emmer’s requests are burdensome and that the counties have election work they must complete before they can fill Emmer’s requests.

“It’s clear that the Emmer campaign has embarked on one of the biggest legal fishing expeditions in Minnesota history,” Dayton recount attorney David Lillihaug told reporters on Friday. “And that’s going cost the counties a tremendous amount of money.”

“At a time when they are preparing for a recounts and get the rosters in order, the Emmer team has put an enormous burden” on them, he added.

The Star Tribune notes that counties cannot, by law, send rosters or registration information until everything has been reported.

“No polling place roster may be inspected until the voting history for that precinct has been posted. No voter registration application may be inspected until the information on it has been entered into the statewide registration system,” state statute says.

There’s also the matter of redacting voters’ private information.

“Many of the documents they are asking for have some sort of private information on them,” Washington County elections director Kevin Corbid said on Wednesday at a panel discussion at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute. “It’s not as simple as just shoving 13,000 documents through our copier.”

Corbid also added that small counties only have a handful of employees and as counties prepare for truth in taxation and other county functions at the end of the year, a massive document request can easily overwhelm already busy administrators.

The 8,700 vote margin that Dayton has over Emmer has been seen as insurmountable by experts and especially the Dayton campaign.

Dayton’s camp is urging Tom Emmer to waive the mandatory recount.

“It will be mathematically impossible for Tom Emmer to overturn these results, barring some unforeseen problem which we haven’t seen in this canvassing process,” said Ken Martin of the Dayton recount team. “We’re fairly certain this will not happen. In fact we’re hearing from county officials as well as others that this canvass has gone amazingly smooth. Now it is fairly likely that an automatic recount will be triggered. However, it should be noted that Representative Emmer still can decline this recount.”

Emmer’s lawyers have been adamant that the will proceed with the recount which they are legally entitled to.

The Sunshine Review recently completed a 10-point evaluation of Web access to county government information for all 3,140 counties across the United States.

One factoid: Among Minnesota’s 87 counties, only 23 make their budgets available via the Internet.

St. Louis County, which includes the city of Duluth, ranks highest in the state. All that’s lacking from the St. Louis County Web site, according to the study, is information about permits and zoning (a single criterion) and lobbying. The county is the only one in the state to offer information in all four of these often-overlooked areas: audits, contracts, public records and taxes.

Still, the northeastern Minnesota county (the state’s largest in area) is a surprising title-holder, given recent complaints about efforts to ban a watchdog group from videotaping public meetings.

Olmsted County, which includes the city of Rochester, scored a close second. Its county Web site’s gaps are in lobbying data and public records, with partial credit for providing information about public meetings.

By contrast, each of the Twin Cities’ metro-area counties met only four to six of Sunshine Review’s 10 criteria: Anoka (5), Carver (4), Dakota (4), Hennepin (6), Ramsey (6), Scott (5) and Washington (5).

Sunshine Review has set its sights next on completing evaluations for city government Web sites across the country. So far, 51 Minnesota cities’ Web sites have been examined.

The studies are done by wiki, meaning anyone with Web access can contribute.

Incidentally, a cursory Minnesota Independent evaluation of the mock Web site for the fictional city of Pawnee, Ind., using Sunshine Review’s transparency checklist, suggests a failing grade. The site was created as a subtle promotion for NBC’s new local-government satire, “Parks and Recreation,” which premieres Thursday.

Writes Brauer: “Bottom line: the Coleman folks have to keep looking for Minnesota’s version of Palm Beach County.”

Related: MPR’s Tom Scheck offers a useful FAQ on the recount.