Speaking of the Minnesota Senate recount, results are being updated in real time at the Minneapolis Star Tribune website. Yesterday's certification had Coleman ahead of Franken by 215 votes. As of this posting, with 17% of votes and 25% of precincts recounted, Al Franken has gained 34 votes (or rather, Franken has lost 34 fewer votes than Norm Coleman has) for a margin of 181 votes.

Nate Silver explains:

The reason the vote totals are going down when you might intuitively expect them to go up is that either candidate has a right to challenge any ballot for any reason, even if it had been counted as legal originally. When a vote is challenged, it is deducted from the opposing candidate's total. These challenged votes will go before the state canvassing board in December and be debated (and debated and debated) one by one (by one by one).

Team Coleman has challenged 141 ballots, while Team Franken has challenged 122.

There are also instances where undervotes are counted as valid and added to the candidates' totals, such as Franken's net gain of 28 votes in St. Louis County:

In several precincts in the Democratic stronghold of St. Louis County, Franken made a net gain of 28 votes today that officials said were faintly marked and therefore not originally picked up by an old brand of optical scanner.

Elections officials said the votes were missed by a small number of outdated "Eagle" scanners still in use in 18 of the large county's 184 precincts.

The machines read a ballot that requires voters to draw a thick line connecting the back and front ends of an arrow that points to the candidate.

Only half the St. Louis County precincts that use those old machines had been counted, so one suspects there may be plenty more where those came from.

Also, earlier today Franken won a partial victory when a judge ordered Ramsey County -- MN's 2nd largest -- to release information of the voters whose absentee ballots had been invalidated. While this ruling could mean other counties follow suit, here is the rub:

A key board hasn't decided whether to allow wrongly rejected absentee ballots into the statewide recount.

Certainly, so far, the numbers are moving in the right direction but Franken's going to need to slash that margin at a quicker pace if he's going to overtake Coleman. Some good news for Franken: the two largest counties, Hennepin and Ramsey, which are both Franken strongholds, have only just begun to count (5% and 15% of votes respectively so far.)