More Minnesota Madness

A Minneapolis-based Daily Kos diarist named 'bitwise' has done some further sleuthing on the impending Minnesota senate recount, which we had discussed at length this morning. Here's what he's found:

The freshest data, pulled from the state website minutes ago, shows Franken down by 206 votes. The total presidential undervote is 10086. The total senate undervote is 34916. If the senate undervote is allocated to Coleman and Franken along their fraction of the Coleman+Franken vote in that precinct, Coleman would receive 16573 new votes, Franken 18342, for a Franken gain of +1769.

There are a couple of things to pick through here. Firstly, it appears that slightly more than 10,000 people undervoted the presidential race. Although there are undoubtedly cases in which the voter undervoted the presidency but not the senate race, it would appear that for the most part the presidential undervote is a subset of the senate undervote.

The research I've come across suggests that about two-thirds of presidential undervotes are unintentional. So let's take two-thirds of that 10,086 vote total and assign them to the recount pile -- that equals 6,724 votes.

There were also about 25,000 cases in which the voter voted for the presidency but undervoted the senate race (consistent with the AP's reportined finding last week). Let's assume that in most of these cases, the voter intentionally skipped the senate race, but that in one-third of cases he did not. This equals another 8,277 votes, or a total of 15,001 cases in which the voter intended to vote for the senate race, but his vote was not recorded.

(More here.)