Does anyone understand why so many slight changes in the count yesterday (Franken vs. Coleman)

[Eric J in MN]

I saw one example that "county officials had accidentally entered 24 for Franken instead of 124 when the county's final votes were tallied at 5:25 Wednesday morning."

But are all of these slight changes based on typos when the precincts originally sent in their numbers?

[dflprincess]

1. I think right now they are just finding data entry mistakes

that happen all the time, but usually don't affect the outcome.

[Thegonagle]

6. Yes, that's what they're doing now. All part of the normal certification process.

The machine counts shown on the SOS website are preliminary. The auditors are busy catching entry errors in all races, from Presidential, down to school board and town mayor. Once the auditors are done, they "certify" the machine counts, making them official.

Once the official machine counts are in, they can proceed with the hand recounting of all races in which the machines show a margin of 1/2% or smaller. (And they usually have a hand recount or two every election, but they're rarely state-wide, so we don't hear much about them.)

Where's that picture of Mark Ritchie? The one with the caption, "Everyone chill the fuck out..." Oops, that was someone else, but a local version might just be appropriate in this case.

[kickysnana]

2. Explainations in the 20 other threads on this subject. n/t

[qb]

3. It's curious how even data entry errors favor the Republican.

My suspicious mind wonders how many of these clerical errors were really accidental.

[RL3AO]

4. They randomly audit 200 precincts after the election

Thats why there are these little changes.

EDIT: Meant to reply to OP

[kikiek]

5. Numbers have changed again. It is now 221 difference. Both Norm's and Al's changed.