There are still three undecided Senate races in Alaska, Minnesota, and Georgia.
.JuneauEmpire reports:
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Number of outstanding ballots grows to 81,000
U.S. Senate and other races yet to be decided
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The state Elections Division said Friday 81,000 votes remain to be counted, mostly early votes but also absentee and questioned ballots.
That may be enough to swing as many as six state legislative races, and the number of votes is making the U.S. Senate race between Sen. Ted Stevens and Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich look increasingly close.
Stevens now leads by 3,257 votes out of 221,713.
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Elections Division officials say they expect the next count to be done Wednesday.
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KARE, Twin Cities, MN
With nearly 2.9 million ballots cast, the difference between the top two candidates is about one one-hundredth of a percentage point.
In Pine County, an election official accidentally entered 24 votes for Franken on Tuesday night instead of the 124 he actually received. The mistake was caught on Thursday and the numbers changed, said Jim Gelbmann from the Secretary of State's office.
KARE 11 News has also learned Ramsey County found 55 absentee ballots which arrived on time to be counted on election day, but which were not. Those results have now been included in the new totals.
In northeastern Minnesota, the town of Buhl's ballots had been cast but not counted in statewide totals. It turns out election officials there counted the votes but never called them in.
St. Louis County Director of Elections Paul Tynjala said officials tried to call Buhl for the results, but everyone had already gone home. He calls the incident a "goof-up" in which someone thought someone else had already called in the votes.
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Of almost 3 million votes cast, is it plausible that the vote count should be this close?
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Franken sees boost in nail-biter election
CNN All Platform Journalist Chris Welch
Former President Clinton campaigned with Al Franken a week before Election Day.
MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota (CNN) — In a move that could be seen as a benefit to Democrat Al Franken, a Minnesota judge Saturday denied a request from incumbent Republican Sen. Norm Coleman's campaign to block certain uncounted absentee ballots from being counted in a race separated by–at latest tally–just over 200 votes in Coleman's favor.
That slim margin has narrowed since the first tallies earlier in the week. In total, almost 3 million ballots were cast.
According to the court request, the Coleman campaign sought an "emergency temporary injunction" preventing election officials from unsealing, opening, or tallying any absentee ballots that were not inside an official ballot box by midnight election night.
Specifically, the Coleman team was looking to block 32 uncounted ballots from the city of Minneapolis, according to the campaign in the request. They say they were notified late Friday night that these ballots were to be counted the next day.
In a statement, Coleman recount attorney Fritz Knaak said the purpose of the request "was to secure those ballots until we could receive some kind of testimonial assurance, some proof, that they hadn’t been tampered with, that they had been secured and that there will be no question in the mind of the electorate that there had been any wrong doing."
Ramsey County District Court Judge Kathleen Gearin turned down the request "for lack of jurisdiction."
Franken spokesman Andy Barr called it a "sneak attack" on the part of the opposing campaign because he says no one in the Democrat's campaign found out about the motion until an hour before the court hearing on Saturday.
"They are, to us, pretty clearly trying to do whatever they can to cast doubt on this extremely routine process of canvassing and checking the tabulations and trying to freeze the votes where they were election night where coleman had a [greater] lead," Barr told CNN.
Minnesota law mandates a recount when election results are this close.
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