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Democrat Al Franken leads by 251 votes over Republican Sen. Norm Coleman on this leg of the Senate race recount, says the Minnesota Star-Tribune. Political statistician (math geek) Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight

Franken is Winning, and Coleman Knows It

3. The Star Tribune has a more direct way to account for withdrawn challenges. Specifically, they have projected them out based on the votes of their readers, thousands of whom sorted through each ballot individually on the Star Tribune's website. The Star Tribune projects a Franken win by 78 ballots based on these reader estimates, fairly closely matching my back-of-the-envelope math.

Kudos to the Star-Tribune for digitizing each ballot, and to its readers for wading through the pdfs and voting on the validity of the challenges. An easier way to look at some of the disputed ballots, with comments from some "experts," is by flipping through the ballot images at the bottom of this photo gallery, Experts review 50 challenged ballots.

The ballot, initialed by a voter to indicate a correction, as one might do when correcting an error while writing a check, was considered by a Franken vote by the three experts. It also makes clear there's no way to correct a vote made in error in a way that can be read by the scanner.

Related: The Last Recount : Matt Taibbi's visit with Franken in Rolling Stone is a hoot:

...rather than throwing red meat to the assembled volunteers, Franken is actually trying to calm them down. Walking back and forth, he leads them in a mock war chant that tweaks the old red-blue outrage:

"What do we want?" Franken shouts.
"PATIENCE!" the volunteers respond.
"When do we want it?" Franken asks.
"NOW!" the crowd demands.

Franken turns to former Clinton adviser Paul Begala, whom he has invited to the meeting to talk about the recount. "You like that?" he says, beaming. "It's the only dada version of that meme."

 Tags  election

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