The closest senate race in the country just got a little closer.

The number of votes separating Minnesota Republican Norm Coleman and challenger Al Franken shrunk to 221 from a high of more than 700 after Election Day out of 2.9 million ballots cast.

Franken, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party candidate (essentially, the state chapter of the Democratic Party), gained 100 additional votes Thursday when an election official in Pine County mistakenly typed in “24″ votes for the former Saturday Night Live comedian instead of “124.”

Franken scored 200 votes Wednesday when election officials in Buhl realized they hadn’t submitted results from Tuesday’s election.

Coleman’s campaign manager Cullen Sheehan suggested something nefarious was taking place.

“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.
 
And now, 32 absentee ballots have turned up in another heavily Democratic county of Minneapolis that could further cut into Coleman’s lead.

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.

On Saturday, the judge denied the request on jurisdictional grounds. A city attorney issued a letter stating that the election official did not mishandle absentee ballots.

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.

Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie met privately with officials from both campaigns Friday afternoon. Details of the meeting are unknown. On Friday, Coleman’s campaign demanded to see documents from county and state officials to help explain why and how election results changed since Tuesday.

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.”

One explanation may be that the type of voting machine used in nearly all of the counties in Minnesota either incorrectly tabulated the vote counts or failed to read the ballots.

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.”

Johnson said the warranties on the ES&S voting machines would be voided if clerks attempted to perform maintenance on the voting machines. The contract Michigan signed with ES&S does not include preventative maintenance. It’s up to each city or township clerk to pay ES&S separately to perform maintenance on the machines.

“ES&S has not performed any preventative maintenance under the state contract, since the machines were delivered three years ago,” Johnson wrote. “I would urge you to investigate whether vote totals could be affected by the failure to provide regular cleaning and preventative maintenance with the ES&S M-100 tabulators.”

Ritchie, Minnesota’s Secretary of State said the M-100 optical scan machines used in the Coleman/Franken race were tested and performed accurately.

But it’s possible, Ritchie said in an interview with Minnesota Public Radio earlier this week, that a recount will uncover voter machine failures that could tip the outcome of the election in Franken’s favor.

Joe Mansky, the chief elections official in Ramsey County, said in past elections at least two out of every 1,000 ballots cast were not counted, for unknown reasons, by the optical scan voting machines. But he said most discrepancies are the result of human error.

A recount could easily shift the election, and with more than 3 million ballots cast statewide in Tuesday’s senate race between Franken and Coleman it’s likely that will happen during a recount.

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.

Election activists in the state have reported that voting machines malfunctioned in several counties, and there were cases where voters disappeared from the rolls.

“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.”