TPR: The Public Record "In-Depth, Investigative, Independent"

The Senate race in Minnesota between incumbent Republican Norm Coleman and Democratic challenger Al Franken continues to get tighter with each passing day.

On Monday, at 10 p.m. EDT, Coleman lead Franken by 206 votes. That's down from a 221 vote lead on Friday and more than 725 votes that separated Coleman and the former Saturday Night Live comedian one day after the Nov. 4, election, according to the latest unofficial figures released by Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie.

Coleman's total vote tally is 1,211,562 votes and Franken has 1,211,356 votes out of 2.9 million ballots cast.  

The tight race will lead to an automatic recount, which Minnesota state law says is triggered if the margin of victory is less than half of 1%.

Ritchie said the recount and final results should be complete by Dec. 19. He has given county election officials until Dec. 5, to submit results of the recount.

A ruling on ballots that have been called into question by the Coleman and Franken campaigns will take place on Dec. 16, when the state's canvassing board meets.

Meanwhile, Franken and Coleman have been soliciting donations from supporters for their recount efforts and to pay for lawyers to oversee the process in 87 counties.

Republicans and Democrats have been paying close attention to the events unfolding in Minnesota, which has the honor of being labeled the closest Senate race in the nation. The Minnesota contest, along with the still undecided senate races in Alaska and Georgia, if decided in favor of Democrats, will shift the balance of power in the senate to a filibuster-proof majority.

Franken tried unsuccessfully Monday to have 461 absentee ballots that were rejected by the Hennepin County canvassing board reviewed and reconsidered, claiming they were improperly discarded.

Former federal prosecutor David Lillehaug, who began working with the Franken campaign last week on the recount, said the canvassing board disqualified ballots because signatures didn't match and voters did not properly fill out registration forms. But Lillehaug said the board was mistaken in its decision because some of the ballots are valid.

Franken, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party candidate (essentially, the state chapter of the Democratic Party), gained 200 votes Wednesday when election officials in Buhl realized they hadn't submitted results from Tuesday's election.

Franken scored another 100 votes Thursday when an election official in Pine County mistakenly typed in "24" votes for the former Saturday Night Live comedian instead of "124."

Coleman's campaign manager Cullen Sheehan has been suspicious of the turn of events.

"We are now seeing huge chunks of votes appearing and disappearing - statistically dubious and improbable shifts that are overwhelmingly accruing to the benefit of Al Franken," Sheehan said.
 
Last week, 32 absentee ballots turned up in another heavily Democratic county of Minneapolis that threatens to further cut into Coleman's lead.

On Saturday, Coleman's campaign tried to stop the ballots from being counted by asking a Ramsey County court judge to issue a restraining order stating that the integrity of the ballots may have been jeopardized.

The judge denied the request on jurisdictional grounds. A city attorney issued a letter stating that the election official did not tamper with the absentee ballots.

Coleman's campaign has also demanded to see documents from county and state officials to help explain why and how election results changed since Tuesday.

Undervotes

The Associated Press reported Friday that more than 25,000 ballots in Minnesota counties that voted for Barack Obama did not register a vote for either Coleman or Franken, which could be explained by a misreading of ballots by the state's optical scan voting machines.

"Though some voters may have intentionally bypassed the race, others may have mismarked their ballot or optical scanning machines may have misread them, the AP reported. "A recount to begin Nov. 19 will use manual inspection to detect such ballots.

The Associated Press declared Coleman the winner early Wednesday, but hours later the wire service "uncalled" the race.

"There's one more critical statistic: About 8,900 people weren't recorded as voting for president, according to county-by-county turnout estimates kept by the Secretary of State's Office," the AP report said.

"That nearly 9,000 people would skip the closely watched race is questionable, raising the possibility that as many as 33,700 ballots might be subject to change in a hand recount. What recount teams will be looking for is whether stray or light marks on ballots signaled a voter's preference."

Electronic Voting Machines

One explanation, which was dismissed by Ritchie and other Minnesota election officials last week, is that the type of voting machine used in nearly all of the counties in Minnesota have been found to have failed accuracy tests. 

According to an Oct. 24 letter sent to the federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC), Ruth Johnson, the Oakland County Clerk/Register of Deeds, warned that tabulating software in Election Systems & Software M-100 optical scan voting machines recorded "conflicting" vote counts during testing in her state.

Minnesota voters' uses optical scan ballots that voters mark by hand. As first reported by The Public Record Wednesday, ES&S's M-100 optical scan voting was used in Minnesota counties and in more than a dozen other states on Election Day.

Johnson, the Oakland County Clerk, said in her letter last week to the EAC that the M-100 voting machines used in four communities Tuesday "reported inconsistent vote totals during their logic and accuracy testing."

"The same ballots run through the same machines, yielded different results each time," says the letter addressed to Rosemary Rodriguez, the chairwoman of the Election Assistance Commission. "ES&S determined that the primary issue [that caused the machines to formulate incorrect vote counts] was dust and debris build-up on the sensors inside the M-100" voting machine. "This has impacted the Digital to Analog Converter (DAC) settings for the two Contact Image Sensors (CIS)."

"This begs the question," Johnson wrote. "On Election Day, will the record number of ballots going through the remaining tabulators leave even more build-up on the sensors, affecting machines that tested fine just initially? Could this additional build-up on voting tabulators that have not had any preventative maintenance skew vote totals?

"My understanding is that the problem could occur and election workers would have no inkling that ballots are being misread."

Ritchie, Minnesota's Secretary of State said the M-100 optical scan machines used in the Coleman/Franken race were tested and performed accurately. ES&S has blamed the problems in Oakland County on an "operator" error. The company told Minnesota Public Radio in an e-mail "that lack of maintenance and mistakes in configuring the machines were responsible."

Johnson said in her letter that under the county's contract with ES&S, the warranties on the voting machines would be voided if clerks attempted to perform maintenance on the voting machines..  

Still, it's possible, Ritchie said in an interview with Minnesota Public Radio last week, that a recount will uncover voter machine failures that could tip the outcome of the election in Franken's favor. But it could also result in additional votes for Coleman.

University of Iowa computer scientist Douglas Jones, one of the leading experts on optical scan voting machines, told the technology magazine Ars Technica last week that the M-100 voting machines have "been pretty good" when he tested them. 

But "it's not uncommon in the studies I've seen for 4 percent of ballots in absentee voting to need to be seen by human eyes," Jones said. "Even in precinct voting, you'd expect to have to look at 1 or 2 percent of ballots directly. Overvotes should get caught right there on the spot, but undervotes may not be."

Ed Felten, a Princeton computer scientist who also studies voting machines, told Ars Technica "that even if errors were totally randomly distributed, it wouldn't be a statistical stretch to see a shift of a few hundred votes in one direction or another."

But, Ars Technica quoted Felten as saying that "partisan geographic clustering throws another wrinkle into the mix."

"If the machines in certain counties were less well maintained than others, then undervotes may have been more likely in a disproportionately Democratic or Republican area," Ars reported. "And the same would hold if some voters were more likely than others to mark their ballots less clearly, leading the scanners to miss a selection."

Franken, who in the past has refused to believe that electronic voting machines could alter the results of an election, said Wednesday said his campaign was also looking into "irregularities", including some polling places in Minneapolis that ran out of registration materials.

"Our office and the Obama campaign have received reports of irregularities at various precincts around the state," Franken said in a statement. "For instance, some polling places in Minneapolis ran out of registration materials."

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