Good News For Franken in Minnesota

Nate at FiveThirtyEight reports that Al Franken's Senate campaign has received three pieces of good news:

• The campaign's estimate of how far behind Coleman they are has dropped to fifty votes,
• a batch of previously uncounted votes was found, and this batch wound up going for Franken by 37 votes, and
• most importantly, the Canvassing Board has instructed the counters to examine the absentee ballots to make sure that they weren't erroneously rejected.

The last piece of news has the possibility of changing the entire race - when everything is down to tens of votes, a process that could give Franken up to 100 votes makes his path to victory that much more secure. A Franken win would be an additional morale boost to Democrats, as we would recover Democratic icon Paul Wellstone's Senate seat, retire the odious Norm Coleman and give us 59 seats in the Senate.