Franken-Coleman Recount, 11/24/08: Exponential Challenges and Ballot Craziness

It’s Monday night verging on Tuesday morning now, and I could give you an alleged recount lead number, but why bother?  As Nate Silver says at FiveThirtyEight, there’s really no point to it because the vast and growing number of ballots challenged and thus set aside is well over ten times as high as the current alleged lead of Norm Coleman’s.  Oh, what the hell:  It’s 210, per the Strib (or 172, per the Secretary of State’s office and the MnIndy) — but again, please bear in mind:  The number of challenged ballots is now at 2801, which is around fifteen times the size of Coleman’s alleged lead.  In other words, it’s addition by subtraction, as I’ve said before.  Coleman himself has said that he thinks most of the challenges will be dismissed, which to me sounds a lot like admitting that he knows the challenges were bogus to begin with. 

Aside from the ongoing ballot-challenge tit-for-tat,  it looks as if a number of ballots may have gone missing in precincts across the state:

Franken’s recount attorney, Marc Elias, said the campaign had become aware of the problem in the last few days from reports in the press as well as from campaign workers in the field. “Ballots have gone missing,” Elias said, calling it “a serious matter [that is] very concerning.”

He named more than a half dozen instances — from St. Paul to Duluth, and Crystal to Apple Valley — where the recount has turned up discrepancies between the number of recorded votes and the number of ballots county officials have been able to produce. And besides the cases reported in the news media, Elias said, the campaign’s own information indicates “this problem may be even more widespread.”

Now, it could be just sloppy counting on the precincts’ parts, but with a margin this narrow, missing ballots could loom large here.  The fact that the Franken campaign is insisting on pursuing these ballots and the Coleman campaign is not (and in fact is attacking the Franken campaign over this) is quite suggestive as to who these missing ballots might favor. 

But disappearing ballots aren’t the only problem:  We’ve now run into extra ballots in some areas:  When Becker County started its recount this morning, it had 61 more ballots on hand than were recorded by the end of Election Night.  53 of those ballots came from mail-in precincts, and eight were absentee ballots.   In addition, four other ballots have apparently vanished from Holmesville Township in northern Minnesota.  The ballots were tallied after the polls closed, but now these four ballots (three for Coleman and one for Franken) have grown legs.

So when will this all end? Not for another two weeks yet:  Two counties, Todd and Sherburne, don’t start their counts until tomorrow; a third county, Stevens, starts on Wednesday; and the last six counties won’t start their recounts until next week.   And meanwhile, the challenged ballots will keep being pulled from the tally to be looked at later.