MN-Sen: Quick notes

Where are we in the recount? Short answer? Who the heck knows.

The slightly longer answer:

• Oh noes! Coleman's lead has increased to 330 votes! But don't sweat it too much. The canvassing board has been reviewing Franken challenges, which were expected to tilt heavily toward Coleman. The same thing should happen when the board reviews the much larger pile of Coleman challenges -- the majority should end up on Franken's column.
• The Minneapolis Star-Tribune crunches some numbers and projects that Franken will win by 275 votes.
• But Nate argues it's pretty tough to make such projections.

  We might know now something about many votes a candidate has gained during the challenge process, but we don't really have a good idea of where he stood before the challenge phase began.

  We also know nothing so far about the nature of the Coleman challenges. Since Coleman withdraw fewer of his challenges, does this mean that the challenges he retained are less likely to be successful? That seems highly probable -- but, we can't be certain. Also, will Coleman's challenges have a different typology from Franken's? For instance, will a significant fraction of them concern nonvotes, as opposed to Franken votes the campaign is trying to have excluded? We simply don't know.

• The Minnesota Supreme Court heard arguments today on the Coleman campaign's efforts to prohibit the counties from counting erroneously disqualified absentee ballots. Coleman's camp wants those ballots to be set aside and handled by the courts.

  Magnuson told justices that counties don't have the authority to go back and revisit the rejected absentee ballots. If there's a question about them, he said the Franken campaign should bring them to the court after the canvassing board is finished with the recount.

  The Coleman campaign does have one point -- it's silly to have properly cast ballots counted in some counties and not others depending on the whims of local officials. Best to count them all, which is hopefully how the court rules.

• At this joint, the best coverage of the recount, bar none, has come from WineRev. I look forward to having his or her analysis of yesterday's count when I wake up Thursday morning. (I'm actually writing this Wednesday night. I'll be soundly asleep when this post publishes).
• The other thing I'll do when I get up is head on over to The Uptake, which has featured phenomenal coverage of the canvassing board meeting. They've got a live feed, while offering real-time links to scans of the ballots being reviewed by the board. I've already lost countless hours to the coverage, unable to tear myself away from the ballot review, and I'll lose countless more Thursday and Friday. Unless I've misunderstood (which is easy trying to follow this saga), they'll get to the Franken pile today, so Coleman's lead will once again begin to shrink.