1God may not be playing dice with the universe, but now you can.
My four month obsession following TheUptake's coverage of the Minnesota Recount and The Election Contest is paying off. I have used available information and archives of the proceedings to develop a set of spreadsheets which have received multiple acclamations from the community of individuals who are following the proceedings.
I have cleaned up the spreadsheets and included explanations of the codes I have used so that others can follow the proceedings and use the data to create their own scenarios of how the effects of certain rulings and orders from the court will impact the final outcome.
(1) Offer currently valid only with the Minnesota Absentee Ballot Universe.
My data is split between three spreadsheets and multiple pages on each.
I have a rejected absentee ballot (1.3MB) spreadsheet which was derived from converting the images of the tables within the various filings by both parties into text. I have used the testimony and the Orders from the court to categorize as many ballots as possible in order to estimate how many ballots of each type might exist in the total.
My estimate of 530 "no registration" Coleman ballots doesn't correlate with the 1000+ Coleman ballots which were ordered opened by the court until you include the other categories that officially fall into the no registration category (no proof, no registration signature, no reason given for unregistered voters, wrong precinct etc) which have been ordered opened. The list of ballots order opened for inspection also includes ballots which were rejected because of an invalid registration card presumably to ensure an acceptable registration isn't in the envelope.
The latest version of my rejected absentee ballot spreadsheet includes a scenario calculator which allows you to adjust the formulas based on your own interpretation of the scenarios.
I started by assuming the ballots on Franken's combined list are similar to the Franken only list. Franken was forced to list those ballots in order to prevent Coleman from withdrawing the ballots that his team knew would favor Franken.
The default scenario is designed to see what percentage of Franken ballots must be valid in order for Franken to win the election.
I set Coleman's validity rate to 30%. Coleman's team hasn't been making much of an effort in open court to show his ballots deserve to be opened and counted but the fact that 77% of the ballots which will be opened under the court's order were not presented in court we can assume all 5300 ballots are under consideration even those the testimony showed were invalid. I set Coleman's validity rate assuming he has been presenting his best ballots behind the scenes.
I set the Registration found rate at 45%. This is a high estimate based on the Plymouth election supervisor Sandra Engdhal's testimony that 50% of the secrecy envelopes from voters who didn't include a registration card in the proper place had put their registration in the secrecy envelope. I reduced the 50% by an additional 5% since the the overall rejection rate was 4% and these voters have already proved they don't follow instructions very well.
Those manipulatable variables determine how many ballots will be counted. Those are weighed by the county/city results to determine how the vote will split for the candidates.
The final set of variables I have made available for adjustment are referred to as the "over performance rate" and are used to account for cherry picking ballots by both campaigns. This increases the percentage of votes the candidate will get from his ballots for each county/city. I set Coleman's 5% higher than Franken's based on the Republican parties historical advantage in identifying their voters.
Finally I set Franken's validity rate to 60% which is the percentage of good ballots he needs to prevent Coleman's numerical superiority from being enough to allow him to win the election. Franken's team has been almost perfect when it comes to proving their ballots deserve to be counted and have been concentrating on identifying valid ballots since it it became apparent there would be a recount and an election challenge. That is Franken's advantage because Coleman's team hasn't been concentrating on identifying valid republican absentee ballots until late in the recount and only had a little over a month to get their list together.
I combined the Canvas report (156 pg) which ended with Coleman up 215 with turnout data the final recount results (850kb) to produce a single two page spreadsheet where all the data can be analyzed and sorted.
My MN-Sen results (3.4MB) spreadsheet is available to everyone. I don't plan any further edits but the link provided will always have my latest saved version.
During the recount I compiled a spreadsheet of challenged ballots which included the image links from Minneapolis Public Radio and was sorted by county and precinct. I incorporated the final Coleman and Franken challenges official reports on the disposition of challenges to confirm the allocation of challenges.
Coleman claimed that some of the challenged ballots were erroneously awarded due to clerical errors and mistakes on the part of the canvasing board in his filing so there is a potential for some challenged ballots to be reviewed during the trial. Coleman had the opportunity to visit the challenged ballots issue during the first few day's of the trial at the testimony of Deputy Secretary of State Jim Gelbmann but the issue didn't come up.
My Challenged ballots (3.3MB) spreadsheet is also available to everyone. I don't plan any further edits but the link provided will always have my latest saved version.