Recount

The MN Senate recount is over, with nothing but court challenges yet. There are probably people out there who want to shout about unfairness here or there, but that's not the point of this post. For now, let's just assume that the ballots have been counted fairly, ok?
Holy cats, Minnesota should be horribly embarrassed! We are now almost two full months past the actual election and only today have they finished up. Sixty days later, if you can believe that. And this hasn't been because of frivolous challenges either. Nothing has happened that shouldn't be expected in any close election. This process needs to be streamlined and improved somehow. I hope that some sense of shame will crop up and spur some improvement in case of future recounts.
And the change in election totals is rather staggering. After all precincts reported in, the margin was something like a 726 vote for Coleman. Then counties started double checking and correcting results and the official tally became 215 for Coleman. This MPR report suggests that vote corrections are pretty common in Minnesota:

But an analysis of election returns by Minnesota Public Radio shows a change of 1,000 votes is fairly typical in Minnesota. A look at elections in the last 10 years shows that the vote totals typically change by about 1,500 votes in statewide elections in the days after the polls close.
...the analysis also showed that Democrats are usually the beneficiaries of post-election tidying up by elections officials. Since 1998, DFL vote totals have typically risen by almost twice as much as Republicans by the time the state canvassing boards certify a final result.

That raises a pretty serious question in and of itself doesn't it? Either there is some dirty tricks at play or (more likely in my opinion) widespread mistake making. Come on, election judges, the number reporting process is very straightforward. Take it seriously and get those numbers in correctly. My job involves plenty of phone calls where strings of numbers are communicated and mistakes involve losing money. We can do it on a regular basis, you can do it on your one night.
One more thing has definitely left a bad taste in my mouth. The rules for filling out your ballot correctly are pretty simple (in person at least, I've never used absentee). I don't like that so many people screwed up their ballots and yet had them divined in one way or another into actual votes. I'm cold-hearted enough that I'd rather throw those out. Each voter is instructed that if they make a mistake they should get a new ballot. Not difficult.
Instead we opened up a huge game of interpretation. We left those votes in the hands of election judges. For the sake of this post, I'm assuming that all decisions were wise and appropriate. What if that assumption is wrong?