Ballot mess in the Franken race

The Minneapolis Star Tribune has an article by James Shiffer about the election clusterfuck:

The search party looking for 133 missing ballots in the Minneapolis elections warehouse found some ballots all right, but not the ones they wanted. This morning, an envelope of 12 unsealed but apparently uncounted absentee ballots were found in a box filled with stacks of plastic-wrapped unused ballots. Minneapolis elections director Cindy Reichert speculated they were put there by a confused elections judge on Election Day and undiscovered until now, the final day of the historic U.S. Senate recount. The ballots will be submitted to the state Canvassing Board, said city spokesman Matt Laible.
Still eluding the searchers was their main object -- the 133 ballots cast in a Dinkytown church, placed in an envelope, shipped to the warehouse and subsequently AWOL. Elections officials think the envelope is hiding somewhere among the voting machines, collapsible stands, shelving, and boxes in the warehouse on Harding Street. Minneapolis election officials, joined by Deputy Secretary of State Jim Gelbmann, clean-election advocates and others, rolled the voting machines one by one across the floor, hoping to find an envelope underneath.
"We wanted this process to be as transparent as possible," said Mark Halvorson, director of the Center for Election Integrity Minnesota. Halvorson and another member of the group engaged in the search. As usual, workers for the campaigns of Republican Sen. Norm Coleman and Democrat Al Franken stood by as witnesses, on what was supposed to be the final day of their two-week vigil in the warehouse. "We've already looked at some of the shelving," Reichert said. And if the ballots are still missing, the searchers will go through the rest.
Speaking to Minnesota Public Radio this morning, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie compared the search to the needle in the haystack. He said that, in a careful way, officials are "dismantling the entire haystack. We really want to get our hands on those physical ballots," he said.

Rico says you'd think they'd never done this before...