Some interesting developments since earlier this week when Al Franken seemed like Mr. nice guy when it came to challenging Coleman ballots. As of this posting, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune website, with 64% of votes recounted, Franken has made up 95 votes to close to within 120 votes of Coleman. It should be noted, however, that this number is with Franken challenging 848 of Coleman's ballots and Coleman challenging 821 of Franken's. Remember that all challenged ballots get removed from the count until they can be assessed by the canvassing board.

Nate Silver explains:

Meanwhile, the number of ballot challenges -- cases in which one or both candidates appeal an initial ruling my local elections judges -- has increased significantly. Among ballots added to the Secretary of State's totals since last evening, the Franken campaign has challenged 7.5 out of every 10,000 ballots, and the Coleman campaign 7.2 out of every 10,000. These figures are more than double the number of challenges on the first two days of the recount process.

Interestingly, contrary to what the tally is showing, the Franken campaign earlier today claimed that the difference between him and Coleman is actually under 100 votes.

...the Franken campaign claims the true difference is much less than that when you take into account disputed ballots that aren't included right now in the totals but are likely to be resolved pretty easily by the state canvassing board.

Even if a challenged ballot is taken out of the total recount pool for the time being, the Franken campaign thinks it has an idea of what the numbers will eventually look like based on the opinions of the election workers at the individual sites -- and they think the real Coleman lead right now is less than 100 votes...

How can this be? Check out this video from The Uptake to get a sense of just how liberally Coleman is challenging, no doubt to give the illusion that he has a wider lead than he actually does.

Clearly all these votes will be placed in Franken's column ultimately, it's just that in the short term there's no downside to Coleman's challenging them and the upside is the illusion of a bigger lead than he truly has. Nate does see a downside in the long run, however:

The disincentive to challenge ballots is precisely this sort of thing -- challenges that look so ridiculous that they'll weaken your ability to take the moral highground. If the Coleman campaign is on the ball, they'll be ready to show similar frivolities from the Franken campaign as well. The Uptake also reports that the Secretary of State is also taking under advisement a proposal to make all challenged ballots available for public viewing on a website.