There's been yet another strange twist in the hotly contested U.S. Senate race recount in Minnesota involving incumbent Republican Norm Coleman and Democrat Al Franken.
Al Franken's lead attorney claims the Democratic challenger is now only 50 votes behind Norm Coleman with more than 200,000 left to be counted. Coleman entered the recount with a slim 215-vote margin over Franken. Roughly 2.9 million votes were cast before the recount. The latest bizarre turn in the race came yesterday when Ramsey County election officials reportedly found an additional 171 ballots that had not been counted on election night. Al Franken won Ramsey County by a large margin (52% for Franken, 34% for Coleman, and 13% for other candidates). Hans von Spakovsky, a former member of the Federal Election Commission, says Ramsey County is competing with Kings County, Washington, which became infamous several years ago for the mistakes it made in the governor's race. "They're claiming that they found these ballots in a ballot box and that they've been secure, but that they weren't counted by, I guess, the Opti-Scan system they had there," von Spakovsky explains. The former election official observes while that is certainly possible, it indicates problems with local election procedures. "[T]he fact that this was not discovered on Election Day and election eve, when they are supposed to reconcile the ballots and the counts, says...the precautions that were being taken and the procedures in that particular precinct were not up to the kind of standards you have to have to have a secure election," he states. The Minnesota recount is expected to continue through the end of the week, and then the state Canvassing Board is scheduled to begin holding hearings December 16 to review challenged ballots.
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