The StarTribune has some stats on the upcoming Senate race recount that should have Democrats cheering.
Al Franken currently trails Norm Coleman by 221 votes out of nearly 3 million cast. The automatic recount will focus on the undervotes. These are ballots which failed to record choice for every race on the ballot. Undervote ballots are not normally rejected by the optical scanners.
According to an analysis by the AP, the ballots for which a vote in the Senate race was not recorded draw heavily Obama land:
An Associated Press analysis of the nearly 25,000-vote difference in presidential and Senate race tallies shows that most ballots lacking a recorded Minnesota Senate vote were cast in counties won by Democrat Barack Obama.
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Three counties — Hennepin, Ramsey and St. Louis — account for 10,540 votes in the dropoff between the two races. Each saw Obama win with 63 percent or more.
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Kim Brace, president of the consulting firm Election Data Services Inc., said there's no reason a ballot without a vote for a particular race would be rejected.
"Usually they're set to kick back to the voter if there is an overvote," said Brace, who has been an expert witness in court cases stemming from disputed elections. "But in most instances they're not set to kick back to the voter if there is an undervote.
But that's not all. What about undervotes where the voter failed to choose a candidate at the Presidential level (can you imagine?):
About 8,900 people weren't recorded as voting for president, according to county-by-county turnout estimates kept by the Secretary of State. That nearly 9,000 people would skip the closely watched race is questionable, raising the possibility that as many as 33,700 ballots might be subject to change in a hand recount.
Markos just pointed out that conventional wisdom suggests that Democrats are usually favored in recounts because most spoiled ballots (not properly marked per instructions) come from inexperienced and first-time voters, or Democratic-leaning voters. But we've got a lot more than that going for us in Minnesota right now!
One more note. This recount seems very similar to me to the Gubernatorial recounts in Washington state in 2004. This race also had 3 million votes cast, and the ballots were also optically-read, fill-in-the-bubble type.
Governor Gregoire netted 390 votes from the recount to win. Looks like we'll need a little more than 1/2 of that this time.