That's right. With 91.13% of the vote recounted, Al Franken leads Norm Coleman by 4,108 votes! That's 1,105,030 for Franken and 1,100,922 for Norm Coleman. Wow, let's just stop here. That's close enough for horse shoes and hand grenades. Thanks for playing Norm. We're just going to take our board and go home.
Um.......
Of course, Franken has lost 2,498 votes from his November 4th totals of 1,107,528, while Coleman has lost only 2,269 from his November 4th total of 1,103,291--which also means that more of the final votes to be recounted were probably cast for Coleman. http://electionresults.sos.state.mn....
Then again, Coleman has challenged 3,067 votes, while Franken has just challenged 2,876. Of course, many challenges are assumed to be spurious and many votes were challenged by both the Franken and the Coleman campaigns, so no one really knows where the election stands right now, except maybe for a few bean counters in the Franken and Coleman campaigns...and Franken's people are now saying that they feel they are within 73 votes of Coleman, while the Minneapolis StarTribune has Coleman with a 344 vote lead, minus the 188 additional ballots that Coleman has challenged beyond those challenged by Franken. So, in this hypothetical null sum game (which it isn't in reality), Coleman would then be leading by 156 votes. http://www.startribune.com/...
So we're really at the ellif stage of this recount--as in 'ellif I know.
Nonetheless, I'm sticking with my lead, because it just sounds better, because it happens for the moment to be true, and because it'll drive the Coleman people nuts trying to explain it away:
Al Franken leads Norm Coleman by 4,108 votes!!!!