P’r'aps only polit­i­cal junkies and Gopher State denizens are paying atten­tion any­more, but Minnesota’s Sen­a­to­r­ial race recount has been steadily moving for­ward for the past couple of weeks. Despite the fact that county vol­un­teers are near­ing com­ple­tion of man­u­ally review­ing the nearly 3 mil­lion vote haul, there’s been pre­cious little to sate those of who have been trained into tap­ping refresh on our favorite polling web­sites like a fleet of Pavlov­ian pooches by the horse races of the past year in politics.

This morn­ing the recount stands at 78% com­ple­tion (like a tor­rent with no seed­ers), incum­bent Norm Cole­man hold­ing on to a 210-vote lead over chal­lenger Al Franken.  That’s vir­tu­ally where the race was on elec­tion night, with Cole­man hold­ing a 215-vote lead.  Franken ini­tially cut heav­ily into Coleman’s lead (by some reports bring­ing it under 100), but as the recount has pro­gressed, Cole­man has pulled fur­ther ahead.

Except he prob­a­bly hasn’t, accord­ing to both the Star Tri­bune and the best poll-​watching site in the busi­ness, FiveThirtyEight.com. Over the past few days, lawyers and recount watch­ers for both cam­paigns have esca­lated chal­lenges to bal­lots, which remove those bal­lots from con­tention for the present until the state elec­tions board can review and debate the bal­lots in ques­tion. With over 3,000 bal­lots chal­lenged, there’s a lot of wiggle room, and if Franken wins just a frac­tion more of those ballot chal­lenges (some­thing like 2/15 more than Cole­man, but I’m no math wizard), he’s the golden boy from the North. Nate Silver runs his magic num­bers and spits out a pro­jec­tion of a 27-vote margin in Franken’s favor. What­ever, he’ll prob­a­bly be right.

God bless tech­nol­ogy, though, since even if we can’t figure who’d actu­ally win, or guess, we have access to little easter eggs within the ambit of national pol­i­tics. Cour­tesy of Min­nesota Public Radio, here’s a visual sam­pling of chal­lenged bal­lots from the Franken-​Coleman Senate race.

I feel sorry for the poor soul who cir­cled the opti­cal scan guide mark–as hard as it may be to believe, there are cer­tainly those who have never or rarely com­pleted one of these Scantron-​type ques­tion­naires. Likely it was dif­fi­cult to read the instruc­tions as well.  (Yes, I do have an elderly indi­vid­ual in mind.)

But good­ness, using pencil? sign­ing your ballot? “Lizard People”? I don’t envy the time the Min­nesota Board of Elec­tions has in Decem­ber as they debate the merits of “crossing out” versus “underlining,” or the respec­tive tra­jec­to­ries of diverg­ing arrows point­ing to var­i­ous marks that may or may not be intended to be votes. It’s a reminder that despite efforts to make voting as easy as can be, there will always be some few voters who can’t get on board with what­ever system is in place, whether it’s fill­ing in bub­bles or arrows or push­ing a finicky touch screen. So it goes. Mr. Hang­ing Chad is out there, some­where, laughing.