Sen. Norm Coleman's Democratic challenger is vowing to push ahead with a recount.
By PATRICIA LOPEZ, Star Tribune
Last update: November 7, 2008 - 9:32 AM
Just as Secretary of State Mark Ritchie was explaining to reporters the recount process in one of the narrowest elections in Minnesota history, an aide rushed in with news: Pine County's Partridge Township had revised its vote total upward -- another 100 votes for Democratic candidate Al Franken, putting him within .011 percentage points of Republican U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman.
The reason for the change? Exhausted county officials had accidentally entered 24 for Franken instead of 124 when the county's final votes were tallied at 5:25 Wednesday morning.
"That's why we have recounts," Ritchie said, surveying the e-mail sent in from the county auditor. "Human error. People make mistakes."
The margin in the tightest Senate race in the country bounced like the stock market throughout the day, with the difference between Coleman and Franken dropping, then rising briefly to 590 votes before shooting down to a razor-thin 237 as of 9:27 a.m.
In a reversal of the previous day, when Coleman had declared victory and suggested that Franken should waive a recount, Coleman kept to himself on Thursday, while Franken called reporters to talk about the prospects for a continued narrowing of the count.
"Coleman said there was no reason for a recount, that there would be no movement," Franken said Thursday, a day after unofficial results initially showed Coleman with a 725-vote advantage. "But you see that it's more than halved and the recount hasn't even started. This election will be decided by the voters, not by the candidates."
Brian Sullivan, a Republican National Committee member, said that "Norm is in the best position because he's still got the most votes, but if he was nervous on Tuesday, he's really got reason to be nervous today."
Sullivan said that in talking to party officials around the state, new voters are becoming a point of concern.
First-time voters may have marked ballots in a way that optical scanners could not read, Sullivan said, but that could be caught by a hand tally.
"We're not talking about improper activity," Sullivan said, "just ballots where votes may not have been recorded if they weren't properly marked."
Ritchie said that as part of its normal election procedure, the state has started a post-election audit in select precincts around the state that will go into next week. The audit process, which began with the 2006 election and is separate from recounts, takes a small sample of precincts in each county and reviews ballots as a test of vote counts and the optical-scan voting machines.
Ritchie said he does not expect fraud to be a factor in the Minnesota race because of 2006 revisions that employ the optical scanners and the post-election audits.
"We have a sound system," he said.
Recount system
The recount system is primitive but thorough, requiring officials in each county to gather paper ballots, visually determine each voter's choice and begin sorting. Observers from both campaigns can challenge ballots, which would then go into a separate pile. In those cases, the state canvassing board, made up of two state Supreme Court justices, two district court judges and the secretary of state, would make the final call.
But even then, candidates can dispute the results of the recount and take the matter to court.
"If this does not go down that road, I would be surprised," said Joe Mansky, Ramsey County elections manager and an election expert. "Frankly, they [candidates] should go to court as rapidly as possible so they'll have the protection of the rules of civil procedure."
Minnesota's last two really close congressional races both wound up in court: the Arlan Stangeland-Collin Peterson race in 1986 and the David Minge-Mark Kennedy race in 2000.
Mansky said that on average, about two of every 1,000 ballots are not counted by the scanners for various reasons, which could add 6,000 ballots in the Senate race -- more than enough to provide a decisive result.
Typically, it's older voters and newer Americans who tend to fill out ballots incorrectly, Mansky said. Older voters are newer to precisely filling in ovals, he said, while immigrants "might have come from a non-democratic country and filling in any ballot is new to them."
Take Action Minnesota, a coalition of labor and other groups, said Thursday that it was monitoring election complaints and had received calls about Somali voters in Minneapolis who were steered toward one candidate or another by interpreters. Those reports have not been proven, spokesman Dan McGrath said at a news conference Thursday, and they came in for both Coleman and Franken.
Other complaints surfaced, he said, but did not appear systemic.
Eyes on the recount
Weary from a protracted campaign battle, field organizations now must convert campaign volunteers into recount monitors, willing to show up at every county in the state to watch over the laborious process of hand-counting 2.9 million votes.
"We've just started that process," said spokeswoman Jess McIntosh as volunteers milled around the Franken campaign office in St. Paul.
Ritchie said that shifting numbers in the Senate race were nothing unusual. "This happens in every election," he said. "Mostly it doesn't get very much publicity because it's just part of the standard process. That's why these are unofficial results."
After the polls closed and 100 percent of the ballots were counted, Ritchie said, county auditors began the process of checking and rechecking their work, sometimes catching transposed or incorrect numbers in advance of submitting official tallies to the county canvassing boards.
Those results must be certified as official by Nov. 18, he said, so county auditors are "really furiously working right now to make sure everything's completely accurate."
Staff writers Curt Brown and Kevin Duchschere contributed to this report.
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