Recount over, Still no winner

We still don't know whom Minnesota's second senator will be. Norm Coleman or Al Franken? And the elections were like what, a whole month ago. The problem is that the race is SO close. During this month, there has been a ballot recount, where volunteers go through all the ballots by hand and count them. (sort of strange because human counting has a greater margin of error than a machine) The outcome should be solved by the recount right? Well not when both campaigns are challenging the authenticity of any ballot that goes to their opponent. To make things harder, an envelope containing about 135 uncounted ballots has disappeared and nobody can find it. Normally, 135 votes wouldn't make a huge difference, when the margin between candidates is usually thousands of votes. But when the recount started Coleman was only leading Franken by roughly 215 votes. Yes, a rather smaller margin than normal.

The thing is, that during the campaign, these two candidates were really, really nasty to each other. There was a lot of accusations, negative adds, mud throwing, etc. Because of all this, the third party candidate Dean Barkley got a higher percentage of the vote than he would normally. However, it was still not enough for him to win. Most people probably didn't vote for him because they were afraid that if they did, the other major party candidate would win.

It seems sort of bad, but no matter who wins this recount and the senate seat, more than half of Minnesotans will be unhappy.

I'm not sure I would be happy with any of the candidates from this election (senate only). It really was a very negative campaign season and that was not pleasant. None of the candidates stuck out as being very original or having especially good ideas. (Besides how best to smear their opponent that is)

I guess we can only wait and see how the recount turns out. Hopefully we'll know before the new senators are supposed to be sworn in on Jan. 6th.