A capsule look at where things stand in Minnesota's U.S. Senate race, five weeks after the recount began.
THE MARGIN
Unofficially, DFLer Al Franken has a 46-vote edge over Republican Sen. Norm Coleman, out of about 2.9 million ballots cast.
NEW DEVELOPMENTS
The Minnesota Supreme Court issued a pair of rulings Wednesday. In one, it rejected a Coleman request regarding ballots that the campaign says may have been counted twice, but the issue is not dead. In the other, the court granted more time for processing mistakenly rejected absentee ballots.
UNRESOLVED ISSUES
Mistakenly rejected absentee ballots: It's estimated that there could be as many as 1,600. The Supreme Court has ordered election officials, together with the two campaigns, to set up a process for identifying and counting absentee ballots that all agree were wrongly rejected. Under Wednesday's order, these ballots must be sent, unopened, to state election officials by Jan. 2, and the secretary of state's office must open and count them by Jan. 4.
Withdrawn ballot challenges: The campaigns have withdrawn thousands of ballot challenges that they made during the recount, but the votes on those ballots have not yet been officially added to the results. A draft report of how the votes would be allocated was prepared, but the campaigns say it contains some errors. The Canvassing Board is scheduled to meet Tuesday to allocate the votes. Franken's 46-vote advantage is based on the draft report.
Duplicate ballots: The Coleman campaign contends that 130 to 150 ballots may have been counted twice because of errors that occurred when duplicate ballots were made for originals that couldn't be fed into voting machines. The campaign says that in those cases, both the originals and the duplicates may have been counted. Although the Supreme Court on Wednesday declined the Coleman campaign's request to have local canvassing boards resolve the issue, the campaign could still make its case in a court hearing.
KEY DATES
Tuesday: Canvassing Board takes up allocation of votes from withdrawn ballot challenges.
Jan. 2: Deadline for local election officials to send to the state all absentee ballots that they and the two campaigns agree were mistakenly rejected. They'll actually be sending the unopened envelopes containing the ballots.
