Minnesota senate seat is a doddle for Al Franken....regressively speaking

For some reason, the Minnesota Senatorial recount is giving rise to extraordinary outbreaks of political anorakking.

First, we have the ongoing detailed discussion of actual contested ballot paper examples on the Minnesota Public radio site.

Now, Nate Silver on FiveThirtyEight has, remarkably, gone to great lengths to present a regression analysis on the recounting so far and the potential outcome. Here's a sample that gives you some idea of the level of the analysis:

Now, we can attempt to solve this equation at the statewide level. When we plug in a t of .499956 -- Franken was picked on just slightly very less than half of the ballots during the initial count -- we get a value for franken_net of .837. That is, Franken will gain a net of .837 votes for every 10,000 cast.

And the conclusion? Al Franken, the Democrat, will be an absolute shoo-in and win by a resoundingly clear margin of 27 votes out of 2,885,555 cast.

That's a margin of 0.00094%.

......a doddle.