The campaigns have been making noises about some sort of détente on the matter of challenged ballots but … well, there’s no sign of it yet. On the contrary, the rate of ballot challenges nearly doubled today from their previous, already-high levels.
The Coleman campaign challenged 38.7 ballots for every 10,000 counted today, the Franken campaign 33.8 per 10,000. On the first day of the recount, those rates were 2.5/10,000 and 2.3/10,000 respectively.
Coleman’s lead according to the Secretary of State’s accounting is 292 ballots, an increase of 54 votes from his 238-vote margin yesterday. However, Coleman has challenged 78 more ballots than Franken within the past 24 hours. This may actually have been a fairly good day for Franken, for all we know, although we really don’t know very much.