When even Kos is confused about how Al Franken can claim a lead in the recount of the Minnesota Senate race after Norm Coleman's allegedly been ahead all this time, I figure that it's time to step in and explain a few things. Follow me past the fold.
First of all, you have to understand that Coleman's official lead is built on the addition-by-subtraction technique. Here's how it works: When you have your election observers challenge one of your opponent's ballots during a recount, that ballot is temporarily set aside and not officially counted in the first go-round of the recount. It's not that you added a vote to your vote totals, but that you - again, temporarily - took one away from your opponent's. Hence "addition by subtraction".
After the recount entered its third day with Franken cutting into Coleman's official lead, Coleman started making thousands of frivolous challenges of Franken ballots so as to remove them, temporarily, from the official count. Franken's team was forced to do the same so that Coleman's faked-up "lead" didn't get too big. But now, thanks to Secretary of State Mark Ritchie's ruling that local elections officials must review the rejected absentee ballots (something that Itasca County had already started doing in the case of three wrongly-rejected absentee ballots), Franken's people obviously believe that enough likely votes for Franken will be added back into the count so that even with Franken's people unilaterally giving up on 633 challenges of Coleman ballots (and thus freeing them up to be officially counted), they still say that they've now pulled ahead by 22. This way, they can sabotage any Coleman efforts to use their media allies to undermine the public perception of Franken's electoral legitimacy, once all the challenges are examined and most challenged ballots are allowed back into the count.
By the way, Ritchie's moves have also decreased the likelihood that this will go to the courts. The only reason Franken's team would sue would be to force all the ballots to be properly reviewed and counted if found to be countable. Coleman, on the other hand, wants to keep all the ballots from being counted, so if he sues, it will be to work towards that goal. Ritchie's latest moves have not only made sure that the rejected absentee and other ballots will get a fair shake, but he's also made it much harder and more expensive for Coleman to try and stop the count with a lawsuit: Instead of having the State Canvassing Board for a target, Coleman now would have to sue at least eighty-seven county elections boards (if not a few thousand municipal and township boards), and his sugar daddies, while generous, will likely balk at that expense.
Go see The UpTake for more on this.