Just 50 Votes Apart

50 votes. That is all the separates Al Franken from Norm Coleman, according the Franken campaign attorney Marc Elias. The closest Senate race in US history may very well come down to the very last voted counted.

Almost 200 ballots were ‘found’ today in one democratic leaning county and that is sure to add to Franken’s totals.

Politico is reporting:

Today’s announcement from Elias comes as election officials from Ramsey County have found 171 ballots that went uncounted Election Night at one of the county’s precincts, which has netted Franken an additional 37 votes. Ramsey County is one of the more reliable Democratic strongholds in Minnesota.

The votes are currently being tallied in the recount.

With over 91 percent of the vote recounted, the secretary of state’s official tally shows Coleman up by 340 votes. But Elias argued the number is misleading, given that none of the 5,952 disputed ballots are included in that tally. The Coleman campaign has challenged 191 more ballots than Franken’s team, skewing the results in its favor.

Elias said, based on the Franken campaign’s own count, they believe they have picked up 165 votes so far on Coleman so far.

“We’re confident we’re going to gain votes when the challenges are resolved because we believe our challenges are of a higher quality [than Coleman’s],” said Franken attorney Marc Elias. “The vast majority of these challenges are going to be thrown out.”

Franken’s campaign team is also attempting to count absentee ballots that it believes were wrongly rejected. About 9,000 absentee ballots were rejected, and Elias believes up to 1,000 of them were rejected unfairly.

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