Minnesota Update: Ballots Vanish, Pigs on the Loose

The Minnesota Senate recount keeps getting curiouser and curiouser.

After the Al Franken campaign claimed its first lead of the recount yesterday, it appeared to suffer a setback when 133 ballots from Democratic-leaning Minneapolis mysteriously vanished.

At first, Minneapolis Elections Director Cindy Reichert claimed that no ballots had disappeared, and that the discrepancy between the initial vote count and the lower total in the recount arose because 133 ballots were double-counted initially. She proposed disqualifying those ballots, which would cause a net loss of 46 votes for Franken.

But once again, Nate Silver’s magic math discredited the double-counting theory, and sure enough, before too long Reichert retracted her claim. The only explanation that election officials have now is that these ballots have indeed vanished into thin air.

Pigs aren’t quite flying in Minnesota, but they are running around the interstate.