I live in Minnesota, and like everyone here, I've been on pins and needles waiting to find out who won the Minnesota US Senate seat. As of right now, Norm Coleman is ahead of Al Franken by 237 votes, a razor-thin margin in a race that had 2.8 million votes cast.
Yesterday I started to wonder if there was any data out there that could tell me whether the manual recount was likely to tilt the election toward or away from Franken. The recount is likely to turn lots of "undervote" ballots (ballots that recorded no vote for US Senate when they were run through the optical scan machine) into counted votes, so the totals for both candidates will certainly both go up. A question that occurs to me is, where did the undervotes occur?
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