It's down to some remaining absentee ballots and the challenged ballots in the Minnesota Senate race between incumbent Republican Norm Coleman and Democrat Al Franken. Today, the five-member Canvassing Board starts sorting through the challenged ballots of which there are now approximately 1,500. It's not certain where we'll be at the end of the week, but, two analyses think the results could favor Al Franken:
The Star Tribune has performed its own analysis of the challenged ballots by relying on a virtual "canvassing board" of more than 26,000 readers who examined at least some of them. There appeared to be widespread consensus that Franken won slightly more disputes than Coleman, enough to theoretically erase the incumbent's narrow lead by late Monday.A Franken win would mean 59 Democrats in the Senate. More importantly, Franken is a progressive and we surely need another one of them in the Senate.
The Star Tribune analysis relies on readers who chose to respond to its Ballot Challenge on StarTribune.com, and there is no assurance that partisans didn't distort the results. But large numbers of respondents from around the nation participated, and each of 15 respondents who viewed the largest number of disputed ballots gave Franken the edge by 3 to 5 percentage points. There was a broader consensus as well. Only 200 of the 6,500 ballots failed to draw a consensus from at least 75 percent of reviewers. Among the others, reviewers decided slightly more in favor of Franken.
Coleman holds a 188-vote lead going into the board's review of the challenged ballots.
The conclusion is consistent with an analysis done by the Associated Press, which showed that Franken netted enough votes from several thousand easily resolved disputes to erase Coleman's lead.
