Get ready to watch Bill O'Reilly's head explode: Math shows Franken win to be a near certainty

[Bjorn Against]

After spending several hours on theStar Tribune website examining 1,333 challenged ballots (20% of the total challenges) in the Minnesota Senate race, I am now fully confident that Al Franken will be our next Senator from Minnesota. I will eat crow if I am wrong on this one, but the math is on my side here and unless there is a huge statistical anomaly that favors Coleman then Franken has this contest in the bag even if those missing ballots from Minneapolis never get counted.

I examined those 1,333 challenges with consistent standards for both candidates, and I have a very good understanding of Minnesota election law so I am confident that the judges on the canvassing board will agree with the vast majority of decisions I made. Most of the decisions were very easy to make as the intent was clear on the vast majority of ballots, and there is no question of how the judges will rule on 90% of them.

After examining 20% of the challenged ballots Al Franken showed a 105 vote net gain. If this trend continues as it has since basically the time I started counting then in the end Franken will have made a net gain of 525 votes after all the challenged ballots are examined giving Franken a 333 vote victory. The margin of error on this statistic is 143 votes, meaning that Franken's lead is more than double that margin of error.

Now some may question where these ballots I looked at are coming from. After paying attention to the down ticket races on the many ballots I inspected it is clear that the ballots were coming from all corners of the state, both urban and rural, both Democratic and Republican precincts. It seems to be a very representative sample, and considering that Franken was showing 15% to 20% more votes throughout nearly the entire course of my analysis it seems highly likely that trend will continue when the other 80% of the votes are examined.

While both candidates had some frivolous challenges, it became clear very quickly that Coleman had far more frivolous challenges than Franken did and as a result he will likely lose by a wide enough margin that it would be extremely difficult for him to mount a legal challenge to the results.

If you think this is just me coming up with these numbers then look at the ballots on the Star Tribune website and you will see that the Star Tribune's results for everyone who took their ballot challenge shows Franken with a 256 vote lead and an 88 vote margin of error. As I generally don't trust online stats such as these because they are so easy for partisans to manipulate, after seeing results similar to that when I did my own analysis I realized that number appears to be at least fairly close to being accurate. If you analyze enough ballots I am sure you will begin to see similar results as well, so if you don't trust my numbers vote on some ballots and see what you come up with. I promise that by the time you look at several hundred of them you will see that things are looking very good for Franken.

Get ready to celebrate at the end of the month, because I am confident that when the canvassing board announces the results Al Franken will be our next Senator and Bill O'Reilly will be rushed to the hospital after his head suddenly explodes.