Recountmania

Nate Silver's digging deep into the Al Franken Recount, but it seems to me there's a fairly straightforward way of working this. In the 2004 Governor's race, Chris Gregoire trailed Dino Rossi by 261 votes prior to the first recount, She won the election by 129 votes. If you exlude ballots that had either been rejected or found in mailrooms (which were mostly in counties that favored Gregoire), Gregoire still would have won by eight or ten votes. The population of Minnesota is roughly 80% of the population of Washington state, which means that a similar net shift would end up netting Al Franken 218 votes, or just enough to squeak out a victory. But, there's a third party candidate who's likely to eat up about 15% of the vote. But, the undervotes in Minnesota seem concentrated in precincts that are tilted towards Franken. So it will get even closer either way. Excitement!