Lizard People Eating Franken Votes

by: tremayne

Fri Nov 21, 2008 at 22:57

Senator Norm Coleman's lead over Democratic challenger Al Franken shrunk again today but not by very much. The latest figures show a deficit of 120 for Franken with 64 percent of votes recounted. At this rate when all the votes have been recounted Franken will still trail and the outcome will depend on hundreds of ballots challenged by each campaign as well as a court fight over some rejected absentee ballots.

The odd thing today is that Franken lost a lot of votes in big Democratic-leaning counties where he had been doing well. The most likely explanation: a conspiracy of the Lizard People. 

Here's an update of the chart I used last night:

Those are some big changes from last night's version. Details ahead.

Okay, here's how it looked last night:

The Big pro-Franken counties are Hennepin, Ramsey and St. Louis and this is where Franken took a big hit today. He went from a gain of 72 to just 23 now. In each county he lost votes and the swing was particularly bad in Hennepin where he went from +14 through yesterday to -16 now.

Franken had gained 18 votes in some medium-to-big pro-Coleman counties through yesterday and did even better today gaining 15 more even though relatively few additional ballots were recounted.

But the small counties were the big gainers for Franken today where he went from -11 through yesterday to +39 now (a 50 vote swing). Much of that came from Meeker county. In additonal to Franken winning a lot of recounted votes there his campaign challenged a bunch of ballots, challenges the Coleman campaign characterized as frivolous:

Coleman officials taped 51 ballots challenged by Franken officials on a wall and podium and labeled them “Franken’s Frivolous Follies.” Most the ballots were from Meeker County and marked with an X rather than a filled in oval.

There appears to be a lot of that kind of challenging going on from both sides, 848 challenges from Franken's team, 821 from Coleman's.

If the pace continues as it has so far (and it probably won't, given the big shifts from yesterday) then Franken would gain another 53 votes and come up 67 short in the first phase of the recount. The second phase will be the counting of the challenged ballots and there's still the issue of the rejected/uncounted absentee ballots.

To catch up Franken needs something to break his way, like:

1. Perhaps the precincts counted in Hennepin and the other pro-Franken counties were pro-Coleman and the inner-city ballots will turn up more Franken ballots. I don't know which precincts within the counties were counted.

2. Perhaps the Franken ballot challenges are less frivolous than the Coleman campaign challenges. I'm not sure how this would work but I suppose it's possible.

3. The lowest percentage of ballots recounted are still in pro-Franken areas. The problem is, he has performed worse in those counties than in ones which favored Coleman. But with roughly 380,000 votes still to be examined in those big counties, Franken might be able to find those additional 67 votes I think he'll need.

ADD 4. Win the absentee fight and win a big enough margin there.