Of course this information needs to be taken with a big grain of salt. But the positive news from yesterday continues to add up. The recount is slowly but surely inching towards Al Franken.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com
Al Franken's campaign announced on Wednesday that, for the first time since the recount began, the Democrat is actually ahead of his Republican counterpart.
Speaking on a conference call with reporters, Franken's chief counsel Marc Elias said the campaign's own internal count showed them up 22 votes, a jump from the 13 vote deficit that they faced on Tuesday.
and here's the big but....
"We have approximately 138,000 ballots left to count," said Elias. "94.3 percent of the state has now been counted... Obviously that number is going to change, but we are pleased thus far with how things are going."
A check of the Star Tribune's tally still shows Coleman ahead by 303 votes.
http://ww2.startribune.com/...
But, I suspect that the Franken team is being pretty fair on how they expect the challenged ballots to fall. There are over 6000 challenged ballots to date.
In addition, the Franken campaign is playing smart and withdrawing 600 challenges that they are calling frivolous. Let's see if the Coleman campaign steps up and withdraws some of thier challenges or will they use Franken's withdrawal as a weapon to try and run up the score in thier favor.
The last group has been building up into the thousands, as both candidates have filed both legitimate and frivolous objections. On the Wednesday conference call, however, Elias said that the Franken campaign would withdraw roughly 600 of their challenges.
and it appears that the courts will get involved somehow.
Indeed, observers of the recount process and even members of both campaigns are bracing themselves for the near certainty that the courts will become involved. Among those aspects of the recount that have been or seemed destined to be legally debated: rejected absentee ballots (of which the Franken campaign says there are some 1,000 that should be counted), missing ballots (171 of which emerged in Ramsey County on Tuesday), and the pool of ballots that the campaigns have contested.
Be sure and help the recount effort at http://www.alfranken.com