Oh what will the Senate do without him?

The Minneapolis Star Tribune has the story by Mark Brunswick about Al Franken's narrow loss:

Democrat Al Franken's campaign lodged a protest today over 133 votes that it said could not be accounted for during the recount of a precinct in Minneapolis, which resulted in a loss of as many as 46 votes for the candidate. Campaign officials sent a letter to the Secretary of State's office and Minneapolis elections director Cindy Reichert, demanding that the votes in one city precinct not be officially reported until a search is conducted for the ballots. Reichert, who said the discrepency was resolved "to my satisfaction", said she plans to report it to the Secretary of State's office.
In the first precinct of the city's Third Ward, the recount showed Franken with 1,010 votes, 80 fewer than the Election Day count. It showed Republican Senator Norm Coleman with 34 votes fewer than on Election Day. Only two votes were challenged in the precinct, one by each campaign.
Reichert said the disparity in the numbers sent officials searching for the possibility of a missing ballot envelope. When none could be found, she said she believes that write-in ballots at the precinct, which were diverted on the side of the ballot box on Election Day, may have been fed through the ballot counter twice on 4 November. "The reason we do hand recounts of the voted ballots is to find human errors," Reichert said today. "We believe there were human errors made in this precinct. The vote totals that we counted on the ballots are what is being submitted to the Secretary of State's office."
But Franken campaign officials said Reichert's explanation can't account for the discrepancy, given that 2,029 people voted on Election Day and the recount recorded only 1,896 votes. The developments came a day after Franken picked up 37 votes from a precinct in Maplewood after election officials discovered a pile of ballots that weren't counted the first time around.

Rico says it doesn't give you a lot of confidence in your election officials when they find "a pile of ballots that weren't counted the first time"... (Isn't that kinda what they're supposed to do, keep track of the ballots?)