Is Al Franken Trailing by Just Two Votes?

The AP puts Norm Coleman’s lead at 2 votes, causing Allahpundit and Kathryn Lopez, among others, to despair. There may be good reason to be anxious, if not desperate, but not because of the AP count. Tomorrow morning the AP will show Franken rapidly pulling away with the lead–but this number is bunk because the state has not allocated thousands of challenged ballots withdrawn by Franken or Coleman. As Nate Silver wrote yesterday, Franken did reasonably well as the canvassing board, comprised of four judges and the secretary of state, reviewed his pile of 400 total challenged ballots, but

we don’t know anything about the nature of the thousands of challenges that Franken withdrew. The state does not appear to have added the withdrawn challenges back into its totals; in fact, it does not appear to have done anything with them. We don’t know, among other things, how many of these withdrawn challenges were made to Coleman votes (in which case, Coleman will now get credit for them) as opposed to nonvotes (in which case, they’re basically irrelevant).