CNN screengrab via youtube.com

CNN screengrab via youtube.com

The recanvassing is done, the initial vote tally was certified, and now the full recount has begun for the 2008 US Senate race between incumbent Republican Norm Coleman and Democratic challenger Al Franken.

So far, things are looking good for Al. As Nate Silver explains:

Of Franken’s net 43-vote gain, a net of 27 of those votes came from just two towns in Saint Louis County, Ely and Eveleth. These Northern villages, characteristically highly Democratic, use an older type of vote scanning technology called the Optech IIIP Eagle which is less reliable and requires use of an alternate ballot design. The Star Tribune reports, however, that about half the Saint Louis County precincts with the Eagle machines have already had their votes re-counted. Thus, it would be dangerous to extrapolate results from these precincts (and therefore to some extent Franken’s overall gain today) to the county or statewide levels.

On the other hand, the precincts that were re-counted today were slightly redder than average, having favored Coleman by an aggregate of 3.3 points during the initial count. No votes have yet been re-counted in Minneapolis (out of more than 200,000 cast), although about 43,000 have been recounted in St. Paul (out of around 140,000 cast on Election Day). Another city which has not yet reported any results is Duluth, traditionally a Democratic stronghold.

Bear in mind here that Nate’s being a bit more cautious than many of the folks in his comments section. He’s also being a bit more cautious than local blogger and longtime Minnesota DFL observer Flash, who believes that Franken is "likely" to win the recount. As Flash notes here, Coleman’s strategy (and that of the RNC and its media surrogates) is to do everything possible to undermine the perceived legitimacy of the recount; they wouldn’t be doing that if they thought Coleman was a lock to win it. Even the massive amounts of bogus vote-challenging they’ve been reported as doing won’t help them much, as bogus challenges won’t be allowed to stand. (To follow the recount live, go to The UpTake’s site, where Mike McIntee’s got out his calculator. So far Franken’s temporarily lost around 17 votes in Minneapolis, but those are all from challenges, most of which will be dismissed by the board.)

The only concrete way in which all of the Republican-generated water-muddying might actually affect the recount is by causing enough bogus FUD to throw the election to the US Senate — which of course would be the basis for more bogus FUD on the GOP’s part, as they would use this to claim that Franken, who would win in the Senate, would have an illegitimate win.