According to Mark Weiner’s report, the Hoffman campaign is leaving open the option of legal challenges if a recanvass goes Hoffman’s way. I talked to Hoffman’s spokesman Rob Ryan, who said the campaign is keeping its own count, and that lawyers have checked out the polling places that reported the bogus numbers. But he was bearish on the campaign’s chances of a post-facto upset.

“It’s not something I would place a bet on,” said Ryan. “Even if the margin had been 3,000 votes on election night, we would have conceded. We just might have done it later.”

Ryan pinned the confusing initial numbers on bureaucratic snafus, not malice. And he said the campaign only had “longshot odds” of passing Owens when absentee ballots were counted. The reason: Only around 10,000 absentee ballots were requested. If the final margin puts Owens anything like 3,000 votes ahead of Hoffman, Hoffman would need to beat Owens by a 2-1 margin or better among absentee voters. And while Republicans hope that Fort Drum could deliver a huge Hoffman margin in absentee ballots, military personnel only requested 2,299 absentee ballots.

The other factor in the absentee count is, of course, votes for Republican candidate Dede Scozzafava. While Ryan pointed out that Hoffman’s victory scenario always involved a three-way race with Owens and Scozzafava, Democrats pointed out to me that the presence of Scozzafava votes further shrink Hoffman’s margin for error. What if 10,000 people voted absentee and she won 3,000 of their votes? That would force Hoffman to win the remaining ballots by a 5-2 margin in order to pass Owens. That, plus Democratic confidence that they ran a good absentee campaign (as they did in NY-20 this year), closes off Hoffman’s hopes unless there are wild swings in the vote count that make this much, much closer.

UPDATE: I’m hearing that only 6000 absentee ballots total will have been returned. Let’s say Scozzafava won only around 1000 of them–probably quite a bit lower than her actual totals. That would require Hoffman to pick up four of every remaining five absentee ballots.

Over at TWI’s sister site, The Minnesota Independent, Paul Schmelzer has the details:

Coleman — who started out his political life as a Democrat, even “proudly proclaim[ing]” his support for Bill Clinton in 1996, before becoming a Republican — states in a new direct-mail appeal that Specter’s recent change of ID from R to D makes the outcome of the Minnesota Senate race even more important. The Pennsylvania senator’s switch means Democrats are one vote away from a “filibuster-proof liberal majority” and “total, complete, unchecked power,” Roll Call reports (subscription only).

“The stakes have never been this high,” Coleman writes. “Our ability to overturn this flawed recount process — and preserve checks and balances against the near total control of our government by [President Barack] Obama and the Democrats — rests in your hands.”

Funds raised will go toward Coleman’s ongoing legal challenge in the still disputed 2008 race against Al Franken.

However, if potential contributors are only interested in prolonging the court battle to keep Franken from being seated, they might want to hold out. Coleman has requested permission from the Federal Election Commission to use campaign funds for an entirely separate set of legal fees — related to a federal investigation of a campaign donor who allegedly funneled $75,000 in unreported payments to Coleman’s wife.

This is the jaw-dropping part of Manu Raju’s new story on Republicans encouraging former Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) to continue litigating to keep Al Franken out of the Senate.

[Tom] Erickson, the Coleman campaign spokesman, said Monday that the senator has raised $25 million — only a small portion of which came from online contributions — since Nov. 4 to pay for his bills during the hand recount.

Coleman only raised $23.7 million for the 2008 election, a pile of money he started building six years ago. Obviously, the contribution limits for recounts are higher than the limits for candidates, but it’s still an impressive show of solidarity from Republicans trying to delay the results of an election.

Who won the Senate race? [Numbers in parentheses represent change from December poll]

Al Franken – 47 percent (+31)
Norm Coleman – 35 percent (-32)
Not sure – 18 percent (+1)

There you go: voters think Al Franken won the recount. Since the only precedent for a Senate re-vote was the 1975 New Hampshire mess, where the Democrat who led the recount won the new election, this is more bad news for Coleman.

The big picture: the percentage of Minnesotans who favor a legal challenge has jumped from 44 percent last month to 55 percent this month. It’s obvious why. The challenge has left the realm of theory and become Coleman’s last-ditch chance for victory. Now a coalition of some independents and almost every Republican supports it.

But the news is, on balance, better for Al Franken. As Josh Kraushaar notes (in a post that, curiously, treats Franken’s and Coleman’s low approval ratings as the big news), a Rasmussen poll from last month showed 67 percent of voters thought Coleman had won/would win and only 16 percent thought Franken would be the ultimate victor. Now 44 percent of voters want Coleman to concede.

Sub-news: Minnesota’s Democratic Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, who’s been turned into a punching bag on Fox News and talk radio, has experienced a slight popularity dip but maintains a 56 percent approval rating. It’s the same story as the Coleman/Franken results—Republicans have hardened their partisan assessment of Ritchie.

As to the Board as a whole, all of our major votes were unanimous. We consistently followed the law in limiting our involvement to a non-adjudicative role, declining both candidates’ attempts to expand our mandate. Further, we painstakingly reviewed each challenged ballot, some more than once, to confirm that we were ruling in a consistent manner.

One can only assume, based on the tone of the editorial, the numerous inaccuracies, and the over-the-top slam at Al Franken (”tainted and undeserving?”) that had Norm Coleman come out on top in this recount, the members of the Board would have been praised as “strong-willed, intelligent, and perceptive.”

The gap between national conservative and Republican opinion of the recount—basically, “They STOLE it!”—and local conservative/GOP opinion is awfully wide. Ed Morrissey, an influential conservative blogger in the state, has a round-up and grim assessment that also conflicts with the Journal. “The Coleman team simply didn’t play offense enough in the days after the election,” writes Morrissey. The obvious take from all of this is that the people who know the state are too smart to scream at election judges and call them criminal accomplices. Given that Coleman’s fate now rests with those judges, that seems like a wise strategy.

Nate Silver, who predicted way back in November that Franken would win the recount, slices and dices the WSJ’s arguments. Basically, it’s full of lies and spin that Republicans abandoned weeks ago, like the myth that some precincts counted more Franken votes than had voters on the rolls. Even John McCormack of the Weekly Standard–another Murdoch-owned publication, and a reporter who did not want Franken to win–notes that arguments about election night/recount vote total discrepencies have been shredded by the discovery process.

For example, without a 246-vote correction in Franken’s favor in one precinct, he would only have had 27 votes–an unbelievably low number in a precinct where John McCain and Norm Coleman each tallied 175 votes and Obama garnered 336 votes.

Again, that’s from a young conservative reporter who’s worked this story for months.

I don’t think the WSJ’s is the most shameless attempt by a Murdoch-owned media outlet to muddy up the Minnesota process. That honor goes to Fox News’s web site for buying two columns by John Lott, a notorious fraud whose career in statistics melted down after libertarian reporter Julian Sanchez caught him using a false online persona to defend his own work. From his first column, explaining the mistabulated votes that McCormack discusses:

The Minneapolis Star Tribune attributed these types of mistakes to “exhausted county officials,” and that indeed might be true, but the sizes of the errors in these three precincts are surprisingly large. Indeed, the 504 total new votes for Franken from all the precincts is greater than adding together all the changes for all the precincts in the entire state for the presidential, congressional, and state house races combined (a sum of 482).

Yes, that’s it: the counting errors in the most expensive Senate race in state history, a contest in which most voters disapproved of the two major-party candidates, were four percent greater than the errors in other races. For Lott, this was enough to start damning the recount.

Republicans lost a heartbreaker of a Senate race against one of their most-hated political figures. What the WSJ edit board and other pundits are trying to do is make this into a Democratic scandal, more proof of a “culture of corruption” in a party that, gasp, stole a Senate seat.

But Franken didn’t respond to reporters’ shouted questions about exactly when he would go to Washington and retreated up the front steps of his downtown Minneapolis townhouse with his wife, Frannie, and campaign aides.

In a brief statement in which he twice referred to his “victory,” Franken also acknowledged just how close his 225-vote margin of victory over former Sen. Norm Coleman was. “I didn’t win the support of every Minnesotan. I’m going to have to earn it,” he said. “I work for you now and I will work hard to earn your confidence.”

Franken paid tribute to Coleman with a note of sympathy that recalled former Minnesota Gov. Karl Rolvaag’s statement after the state’s last big recount in 1962. ”I know that this isn’t easy” for the Colemans, Franken said, because his own family had faced tough days since the election. But he described the recount process as “long, fair and … thorough.”

With a nod toward threats of lawsuits and filibusters, Franken said he hoped Minnesota would continue to be served by two senators “without interruption.” Whatever happens on that score, Franken said he would “focus all my attention and all my energies” on working on issues facing Minnesotans — including an economy he said was in the “worst crisis since the Great Depression.”

Franken’s appearance was one of a very few he’s made since Election Day, and his statement included offerings of thanks to staff, supporters and others that “I wish I’d been able to give on Election Night.” He also thanked election workers in a state that he said had shown the world it “takes its democracy seriously.”

As Franken ended with a pledge to get to work, a woman passerby who had stopped to listen shouted out, “Yeah, get on the job!” From the tone of her voice, it wasn’t entirely clear whether she was a Franken fan, a Coleman backer or simply another citizen ready for the recount to end.

Chris Steller is a reporter at TWI’s sister site, The Minnesota Independent.

I wanted to take a moment to thank you for your support and your patience during this long recount process.

Today I’ve got good news to report: it looks like we’re on track to win. The state canvassing board has completed its job of reviewing all the ballots – and at the end of this important step in the process, we’re ahead.[...]

We’ve got a lot of important work left to do together to get this country back on track – and with the recount process almost over, I want you to know that I’m ready to get to work on day one. For now, though, I’d like to thank you for all you’ve done, and to wish you and your family a Happy New Year. I think it’s going to be a great one.

The election is still far from decided — a complex absentee ballot situation has yet to be resolved — but Ezra notes that Franken is the overwhelming favorite at Intrade, where he is trading at 90 to Coleman’s six.

First, the Board voted unanimously to count the 133 ballots that went missing last week. These ballots came from a Franken-friendly precinct in Minneapolis, and Franken stood to lose a net 46 votes if they were not included.

Later in the day, another unanimous vote instructed counties to include in the recount the estimated 1,500 absentee ballots that were improperly rejected on November 4. With incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman’s official lead at 192 votes, these ballots could easily tip the balance.

Next week, the Board will review the more than 4,000 ballots that have been challenged by the two campaigns. The Franken camp believes that the resolution of the challenges will net the Democrat several hundred votes — last week, when the official count put Coleman ahead by 295 votes, Franken claimed a four-vote lead based on his campaign’s prediction for the challenged ballots.

All in all, there’s considerable reason for the Franken campaign to be optimistic. We’ll keep you posted.