For the last few hours I've been watching the live proceedings of the Minnesota canvassing board, workign their magic on the coleman/franken contested ballots. While mind-numbing at times, it's kind of got a pleasant hypnotic quality that works well in the background. It's kind of fun, because all of the ballots are bizarre in some way. There are works of art, people trying to use circles and vote for the 'Obama-McCain' ticket, various methods for x-ing things out, and votes for Don Johnson.

One rule that has come up is the 'Lizard People' rule: if you write in a candidate, and do NOT vote for the candidate you write in and instead vote for another, it counts as an overvote. So once you write something in, it counts as a vote, which I think is dumb, but understandable. But I think it's just a sad day for smartasses who think they can treat their ballot as something on which they can write something clever.

It's quitting time for the day, and the official tally has Coleman up by an impressive 5 votes. Wild.