Franken Expects to Beat Coleman By 35-50 Votes

From Politico:

Al Franken’s campaign is as close to declaring victory as it has throughout the weeks-long recount in the Minnesota Senate race.

Franken’s campaign attorney Marc Elias said he expects Franken to be leading Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) by “between 35 and 50 votes” when the Canvassing Board finishes counting all the disputed ballots on Tuesday.

“On Tuesday, I will stand before you with that work completed. Al Franken will have a lead of between 35 and 50 votes. And, at some point not too long after that, Al Franken will stand before you as the senator-elect from Minnesota,” Elias said at a press conference Saturday.

Currently, Franken leads Coleman by 251 votes, but his campaign expects that his lead will dwindle after the rest of the withdrawn challenges are sorted out and counted. His lead will also likely grow after the some 1,600 wrongfully rejected absentee ballots are counted--which the Coleman campaign tried very hard to prevent from happening in court.

Franken's range is a bit more conservative than the Star Tribune's estimate that he will win by 78 votes, so Franken's claim seems credible. The Coleman campaign is saying that they'll have the lead once the recount is "fully completed," but they have to say that in order to stay credible.

But in reality, in seems as though Coleman's only path to victory is that the counting of the absentee ballots nets only a few votes for Franken and the state Supreme Court sides with him and mandates a review of the some 150 ballots that his campaign claims were counted twice and that re-tabulation favors him enough to overcome Franken's lead of 35-50 votes. But there is no indication that removing these duplicate ballots will favor him, because they seemed to arise essentially at random during the counting process.

The Canvassing Board will review the remaining disputed ballots Monday and Tuesday, but the counting of the absentee ballots and the matter of the duplicates might drag on into the new year.

But essentially, Norm Coleman needs a miracle on top of a Hail Mary to win this one.