Recount begins in Minnesota for U.S. Senate seat
The still-undecided contest currently has incumbent Republican Norm Coleman leading Democrat Al Franken by 215 votes.
Reporting from St. Paul, Minn. — Standing before an impatient crowd of election judges and volunteer observers gathered inside a conference room early this morning, Ramsey County election manager Joseph Mansky calmly outlined the rules.
One ballot every five seconds would need to be reviewed by hand at each table, he said, as part of a massive statewide recount in the still-undecided U.S. Senate contest between incumbent Republican Norm Coleman and Democrat Al Franken.
Thirty thousand would need to be counted at this office alone each day, he warned. Keep an eye out for stray marks. No food or coffee near the ballots.
Then, Mansky apologized for leaving before the first of the white boxes was unsealed: "I've got to go to court. I'm being sued," Mansky explained. "It's our friends at the Franken campaign, God love them."
The election of 2008 is far from over here in Minnesota, where a breathtakingly narrow lead in the U.S. Senate race -- 215 ballots in favor of Coleman over Franken, out of 2.9 million cast -- has sparked lawsuits, accusations of electoral shenanigans and a Midwestern take on Florida's infamous hunt for hanging chads.
Starting this morning, city and county workers began hand-counting the optically scanned ballots, as the race's whisper-thin margin -- a mere seven-thousandths of 1% -- was enough to trigger a mandatory recount.
The ballot-counters won't be alone. Hundreds of lawyers and recently trained "ballot-verification" volunteers from Coleman and Franken's camps were dispatched to the state's 120 recount locations, to peer over shoulders and gauge how election staffers judge every mark placed on each ballot.
The final outcome could be decided by mid-December at the soonest, though some predict the battle could stretch until January.
The Associated Press reported today that Ramsey County Judge Dale Lindman granted the request by Franken for the release of information on voters whose absentee ballots were rejected, and directed the county to produce the data by the close of business today.
Franken wants the rosters of disqualified absentee voters in all 87 counties to determine if they were properly rejected in the counting of ballots in the close race.
Lindman's ruling applies only to Ramsey County, the state's second-largest county and the home of the state Capitol, but it represents a partial victory for Franken.
