The unremitting Minnesota recount relentlessly rolls on

December 27, 11:48 AMSouth St. Paul ExaminerRob Shirk

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A recount official

You'd think that recounting an election was easy. Not here, in Minnesota.

Pat Doyle of the Minneapolis StarTribune has a stranglehold on this story and I have used his research extensively.

The arrangement is now for the absentee ballots to be identified and State officials are going to be spending the weekend figuring out which ones qualify and which ones don't, and then get the Landslide Al Franken and Landslide Norm Coleman campaigns to agree on them. The absentee ballots will be un-opened.

Landslide Al leads by the razor thin margin of 46 votes as of today and the absentee ballots, originally thought to be around sixteen hundred, will certainly carry enough votes to tip the scales one way or another despite the original number being over estimated.

I still think it's going to be over a thousand. - Deputy Secretary of State Jim Gelbman

The Minnesota Supreme Court ordered election officials and the two campaigns to setup a process to identify the ballots they believe to be wrongly rejected. Ballots that are agreed to have been wrongfully rejected must be sent, unopened, to the secretary of state's office by Jan.2.

Counties have sent the questioned ballots in and the criteria for acceptance or rejection can be found here, courtesy of the Minneapolis StarTribune. The process goes on and will past the Jan. 6 inauguration of congress. It might even go past the inauguration of Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

Karen Harper has a very good overview of the Minnesota recount and has a unique perspective as one who is not from here She views us at a distance from Birmingham, Alabama.

We're so lucky. During the George Bush - Al Gore election of 2000, we were able to argue the merits and results for four whole years. Regardless of the eventual winner, we will have a squabble for six interminable years. Oh, boy.