MN Sen Recount (UPDATE: Stuart Smalley certified winner, lawsuit forthcoming)

[agcatter]

Franken's people on Silver's site are claiming that with the 37 votes added to Franken's number from the 171 "found" allots yesterday, they are now only trailing by 13 votes.

Can anyone tell me how they arrived at this number?

[emailking]

Franken's people on Silver's site are claiming that with the 37 votes added to Franken's number from the 171 "found" allots yesterday, they are now only trailing by 13 votes.

Can anyone tell me how they arrived at this number?

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/12/frankens-good-day-shifts-odds-on.html#comments

First of all, the discussion was with Talking Points Memo. 538 is just reporting on article. The campaign says that if all challenges are rejected they are 50 behind, assuming all remaining counting happens exactly as it originally did. This was before the 37 votes came to light. So adding those in, and taking on faith the campaign claims, that leaves Franken 13 behind at the moment.

[Small Business Owner of Any Repute]

And who wouldn't just take the Franken campaign on their word?

[Bacon King]

Now why in the world would you join the New York Republican Party on account some specific dude happened to have won a majority of the Minnesota DFL's Senate Primary and then is subsequently elected by the Minnesota electorate?

Because Sam is being the attention whore he usually is and wants us to waste a thread or two massaging his ego.

Do whatever you wish.

Note , by the way, that my own comment was not intended in any negative light, just complete curiousity. I'm seriously interested in your reasoning here.

[Lief 🗽]

http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/12/franken_camps_claim_were_now_a.php

The Franken camp now says they're ahead by 22 votes.

[muon2]

Maplewood is a St Paul suburb of 35,000.

The wiki article has only this to add to the standard statistical crap...

"Politics

Maplewood's Mayor (Diana Longrie) and Council (Rebecca Cave, Erik Hjelle, Kathy Junemann, and Will Rossbach) have garnered metro-area attention over the last year for a number of issues. Chief among these issues are the firings, resignations, and re-organizational plan that eliminated some positions."

lol

Also notable is its really weird and illogical shape. It's mostly north of St. Paul, but then a sliver of it about a mile along runs down the east side of St. Paul and is the only thing separating it from Washington county.

The sliver represents the land the 3M selected to be its corporate headquarters in the 50's. 3M didn't want to annex its land to St. Paul. The remaining part of New Canada township after Little Canada incorporated attached that sliver and became Maplewood.

I have the advantage of going to HS in Little Canada so I picked up a share of history of that area.

[agcatter]

Confirmed that the Franken campaign has just announced they have taken the lead by 22 votes.

[Lunar]

Late Update: Elias also announced that the campaign is withdrawing 633 of their ballot challenges that they've concluded have no chance at all of being upheld, the first step by either campaign in pulling back on that particularly nutty element of this recount. This also means that Coleman's apparent lead under other methodologies, which exclude all challenged ballots, will be increasing by around 600 votes.

via TPM

[Sam Spade]

Unless every Franken challenge of an uncounted ballot made yesterday is legitimate, there is simply no way he made up 59 votes yesterday alone.

[emailking]

Unless every Franken challenge of an uncounted ballot made yesterday is legitimate, there is simply no way he made up 59 votes yesterday alone.

The claim is that he is ahead by 22 assuming all challenges of every type are rejected. Thus their claim is not dependant on adding new votes to his total from Franken challenges (unless they challenged votes counted for Franken!). It does mean they are assuming maasive pickups from Coleman challenges being rejected.

I don't know where you get +59 from. They had said -50, and now +22. But 72 - 37 = +35. Obviously the +37 from the found ballots are a special case.

[agcatter]

Yeah, it was a "special case" alright.

[emailking]

I'm just saying you can't count it in sort of the typical variations you get between the machine and hand recount. It's not voter error or machine error or anything. It's just a batch of ballots, valid or not, that were never addressed in the first place.

[Sam Spade]

Unless every Franken challenge of an uncounted ballot made yesterday is legitimate, there is simply no way he made up 59 votes yesterday alone.

The claim is that he is ahead by 22 assuming all challenges of every type are rejected. Thus their claim is not dependant on adding new votes to his total from Franken challenges (unless they challenged votes counted for Franken!). It does mean they are assuming maasive pickups from Coleman challenges being rejected.

As I have shown in the chart above, if we make the flat assumption that the challenge gap is Franken challenging Coleman ballots and vice versa (and the actual precinct-by-precinct numbers, along with the ballots shown by Star Tribune, leads me to assume that this is the case to about a 90%-95% accuracy rate, with the outliers being evenly distributed), the challenge gap is Franken +168 (without making other assumptions).

This would lead to a result of Coleman +135 on present numbers.

Separate of these numbers are the 487 Coleman challenges and the 434 Franken challenges that cannot be associated with a subtracted ballot.  With the flat assumption in mind, as above, the only way to arrive at the conclusion that Franken is up 22 if all challenges are rejected would be for these remaining votes to split in such a way that these remaining challenges resulted in Coleman challenging 152 more ballots that had been counted by the county elections boards as Franken votes in the recount, but not in the original count, excluding the actual changes which I have already noted.  I consider this highly unlikely (to the point of being almost impossible)

So, either the flat assumption is wrong or what you're saying is incorrect.

[Sam Spade]

I don't know where you get +59 from. They had said -50, and now +22. But 72 - 37 = +35. Obviously the +37 from the found ballots are a special case.

Misadded.  +35 would still require Franken to win every challenge made today.

[Lunar]

I don't know where you get +59 from. They had said -50, and now +22. But 72 - 37 = +35. Obviously the +37 from the found ballots are a special case.

Misadded.  +35 would still require Franken to win every challenge made today.

Soo.. not that unlikely given the nature of challenges in this race?

[emailking]

Nothing I said is incorrect because I'm only saying what they are saying. I thought you were taking two statements from the past few days and claiming they must be assuming some of their challenges are going to go their way.

Your flat assumption could be wrong of course. Perhaps Coleman is challening non-votes less frequently than Franken. On the other hand, the campaign assumption that all challenges will be rejected could be wrong.

Certainly both assumptions are wrong in an absolute sense, but then it's a matter of which one gives the better picture of what has happened / will happen.  

[minionofmidas]

I don't know where you get +59 from. They had said -50, and now +22. But 72 - 37 = +35. Obviously the +37 from the found ballots are a special case.

Misadded.  +35 would still require Franken to win every challenge made today.

Soo.. not that unlikely given the nature of challenges in this race?

Possible if the Franken people have finally done what they should have done ages ago - unilaterally cut the ridiculous crap. They *did* start it later, after all.

[Sam Spade]

I don't know where you get +59 from. They had said -50, and now +22. But 72 - 37 = +35. Obviously the +37 from the found ballots are a special case.

Misadded.  +35 would still require Franken to win every challenge made today.

Soo.. not that unlikely given the nature of challenges in this race?

Possible if the Franken people have finally done what they should have done ages ago - unilaterally cut the ridiculous crap. They *did* start it later, after all.

The precincts that came in yesterday showed nothing ridiculous from either side (without benefit of the actual ballots, of course, this doesn't mean that much).  The Ramsey county reviewers on both sides have consistently been the best in my mind anyways - if you note there, the challenge gap is nearly zero and the number of challenges was really low.

[Sam Spade]

btw, the Strib has another 600 challenged ballots online for your perusal...

[Sam Spade]

Instead of questioning this voter's intent, maybe they should be questioning his sanity...

http://senaterecount.startribune.com/media/ballotPDFs/Todd_Osakis_challengedballot1.pdf

[minionofmidas]

Instead of questioning this voter's intent, maybe they should be questioning his sanity...

http://senaterecount.startribune.com/media/ballotPDFs/Todd_Osakis_challengedballot1.pdf

Hm? Why? Just because he prefers MN Dems to MN Reps and likes Ron Paul?

I suppose the "reason" for the challenge is the slightly "wrong" mark (an x in addition to filling in) for Paul and Franken but not lower down - seems pretty obvious that the voter noticed the instructions after making the two x'es.

[Sam Spade]

Instead of questioning this voter's intent, maybe they should be questioning his sanity...

http://senaterecount.startribune.com/media/ballotPDFs/Todd_Osakis_challengedballot1.pdf

Hm? Why? Just because he prefers MN Dems to MN Reps and likes Ron Paul?

Voting for Ron Paul and Franken is a clear sign of lunacy in my book.

[Sam Spade]

One of the more creative challenges I've found so far.  Follow the logic (not that I think it's successful btw)

http://senaterecount.startribune.com/media/ballotPDFs/cottonwood_noprecinct_8.pdf

[emailking]

A lot of dems like ron paul. He knew Obama would win MN and wanted to write in Ron Paul. He knew the Senate race would be close and preferred a Dem in the seat to a Republican. Makes sense to me. We have first place only voting in this country for senate races. You have to vote strategically sometimes. If there were IRV maybe he would have put Barkley first.

[emailking]

One of the more creative challenges I've found so far.  Follow the logic (not that I think it's successful btw)

http://senaterecount.startribune.com/media/ballotPDFs/cottonwood_noprecinct_8.pdf

He's kicking people off the Island...except for the write-ins and not for the Mayor on Windom.