MN-Sen: Franken camp claims the lead

Spin?

In a briefing going on right now with reporters, Al Franken's lead recount lawyer Marc Elias made a stunning announcement: According to the campaign's methodology of tracking the recount results, they believe Al Franken now leads Norm Coleman by a margin of 22 votes.

This would be the first time that Franken has claimed a lead in this drawn-out process, and was clearly made possible by the discovery yesterday of ballots in the suburban St. Paul town of Maplewood, which gave him a net gain of 37 votes.

Remember, this isn't an official count. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune has Coleman leading by 303 votes, which is also not official. So what's going on?

The Star-Tribune count excludes challenged ballots (up to about 4,800 6,000 right now), and there's tons of frivolous challenges mucking up the count. So the Franken campaign is noting the opinion of the local election judges on each ballot, and assuming that the state canvassing board will uphold those original judgments. That may not necessarily happen, and Franken's own math could be off. And given that 138,000 ballots remain to be recounted, this still remains a tossup at best.