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Minnesota, which has the nation's last undecided gubernatorial race in the wake of this month's midterm elections, is likely headed for a lengthy recount, and both parties and the two leading candidates have been scrambling to assemble teams to monitor the effort.
People involved in the recount, whether they are involved in the legal team of either side of the struggle or are non-partisan elections officials, may be interested in finding an extended stay hotel in St. Paul or in any one of the other numerous election centers in the state.
According to the Associated Press, when the initial counting of votes was concluded shortly after the election, Democratic nominee and former U.S. Senator Mark Dayton led the Republican nominee, state representative Tom Emmer, by approximately 9,000 votes. This margin of approximately 0.4 percent is small enough to trigger an automatic recount, as dictated by state law.
Both Dayton and Emmer started assembling recount teams within days of the election. Additionally, according to the Grand Forks Herald, the branch of the state government that runs the elections process has begun laying the groundwork for elections officials to count all the ballots.
The recount, which is scheduled to start on November 29, will see teams spread across the state as they tabulate results by hand. Hennepin County, the state's largest, will be covered by 25 separate counting teams.
The initial recount is expected to be competed with a certified winner by mid-December, but legal challenges from either side mean that the election may not be fully settled until sometime early next year.
A recent Associated Press report indicates that the legal challenges have begun already, as the Republican party has filed suit in the state Supreme Court in hopes of reducing the number of ballots to be counted. They are asking the court to throw out all ballots in precincts where the number of votes cast exceeded the number of registered voters on the books.
The election was contentious in the days leading up to the vote. Emmer was criticized for being too conservative, and many criticized his stances on gay rights. Meanwhile, in a year where many politicians were attacked for their ties to the political establishment, Dayton was saddled with baggage from his time in the U.S. Senate.
The upcoming recount in the gubernatorial election is surprisingly not the first effort of its kind in recent years. Instead, the election for one of the state's seats in the U.S. Senate in 2008 resulted in an even closer vote tally and a recount that proved to be among the most contentious in the nation's history.
According to the Grand Forks Herald, at the end of the initial tally on election night in 2008, incumbent Republican Senator Norm Coleman led the Democratic nominee, comedian Al Franken, by a mere 215 votes. A subsequent recount - combined with the inclusion of absentee ballots that had been erroneously rejected - resulted in a 225-vote lead for Franken.
The subsequent legal struggles over the election were bitter and long, with both sides challenging a large number of votes - in one memorable instance, a vote for Franken was challenged because the voter had written "Lizard People" elsewhere on the ballot.
Coleman eventually submitted filings to a three-judge panel and even the state Supreme Court, but his appeals were rejected and Franken was sworn in on July 7, nearly eight months after the election had taken place and the recount had begun.
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