Darn those pesky ovals.
For the last month, the U.S. Senate race in Minnesota between Republican incumbent Norm Coleman and Democratic challenger Al Franken has been hung up by several thousand voters who apparently weren't content to color inside the lines, offering instead Xs, underlines, blotches, check marks and ink smears on their ballots.
On Friday, the ovals struck again.
Recount officials accepted the ballot of a voter in Rochester, Minn., who filled in the oval -- and a big chunk of the area nearby -- for Franken.
It was enough to push the former "Saturday Night Live" writer into the lead for the first time -- and send election watchers rolling their eyes over the unpredictable kookiness of it all.
"What's so hard in figuring out how to fill in the dot?" asked David Schultz, an election law professor at Hamline University in St. Paul. "I voted absentee ballot and my pen ran out of ink. I was smart enough to go get a new pen. It's not that tough."
By the end of the day, according to the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, Franken had skyrocketed to a 251-vote lead -- out of 2.9 million cast in the election. Coleman's lead had once stood at 725 votes.
Franken campaign officials tried to contain their glee.
"We went into this recount at a virtual tie," said Marc Elias, attorney for Franken. "Anyone who watched the challenge process will tell you we won more votes than they did. As we stand today, other than the absentee ballots, we are ahead."
The Coleman camp, however, remained cool.
"We think that when the recount process is completed, Sen. Coleman's going to come out on top," said Mark Drake, Coleman's campaign spokesman. Drake noted that the campaign filed a petition Friday with the Minnesota Supreme Court, alleging that the recount process was including duplicated ballots.
"We have predicted that the numbers would come out upside down for a while, because of the way some of the procedures are happening," Drake said. "This is not a surprise for us at all."
Who knows where the ovals will lead.
The ballots counted Friday came from a pool of more than 1,000 that had been challenged by one campaign or the other.
The state canvassing board, which is in charge of the recount, is next expected to deal with about 5,000 ballots that the candidates have withdrawn challenges over. The board could allocate those votes Monday.
