Does it count?

The election isn't entirely over yet, you know. Two US Senate seats remain undecided. In Minnesota, the race was so close - Sen. Norm Coleman defeated challenger Al Franken by 215 votes - that state law required a hand recount of all ballots. The Great Minnesota Recount continued yesterday. With 46% of the vote now recounted, Sen. Coleman's lead has slipped from 215 votes to 136 votes. If Al Franken picked up 79 votes on 46% of the recount, projecting this linearly, with 100% of the vote he will pick up 172 votes and Coleman will win by 43 votes. However, there are 823 challenged votes yet to be resolved. In addition, Franken is trying to get thousands of absentee ballots that were rejected for technical reasons (e.g., no zipcode listed) counted. After the recount is finished, then the court challenges begin. This could go on for a while. Stay tuned.

If you want to see why hand recounts sometimes go slowly, take a look at some of these actual ballots from Minnesota. How would you interpret these ballots?