Politics

ANOKA, Minn. (AP) ― By lunchtime Friday, Joni Anderson figured she'd personally inspected almost 15,000 ballots in Minnesota's U.S. Senate recount. She was about halfway done.

"It's fatiguing. It's the same thing over and over and over again," Anderson, a Coon Rapids official helping with her county's effort, said Friday a few hours into her third day of recounting at the Anoka County Government Center.

Many of the people checking ballots are clocking long, tedious shifts with few breaks, sitting on folding chairs and reading the small print on ballots. "It's frustrating and it's time-consuming, and it gets monotonous," said Rachel Smith, Anoka County's director of elections.

Still, the whole premise of the massive hand recount is that it will be more precise than machine tallies. Machine counts are considered to be 99.9 percent accurate -- but that's not good enough in a race where eight-thousandths of a percentage point separated Norm Coleman and Al Franken.

"There are things the machines just don't catch," said Cindy Reichert, director of elections for Minneapolis. The result is so-called "undervotes," ballots that the voter didn't mark hard enough for the machine to register but where their intent is obvious.

While fatigue might lead to error, election officials said there's less chance of error in this recount since every single ballot is inspected by numerous people. At most sites, at least two election workers check every ballot under the gaze of monitors from the two campaigns.

Ramsey County Elections Director Joe Mansky said he thought the best approach would be for election judges to sort the ballots with campaign observers looking on and then feed them through scanners for a more accourate account. But the Legislature changed the law to require manual recounts because of problems in other states.

"We are paying for the sins of Florida and Ohio," Mansky said.

More eyeballs might mean fewer mistakes -- but it also means a whole lot of tired people, both the recount workers and the campaign volunteers. While most recount sites have tried to hold to 8-hour days, the work has gone into the evening in some counties -- on Wednesday night, counting in Olmsted County went past 10 p.m.

In Meeker County, an election judge was worried about his vision after four straight hours of staring at ballots. "My eyes are starting to kill me ... my eyes are really giving me trouble now," said Karl Townsend, according to a story in the West Central Tribune.

Anoka County was giving its workers 30- to 45-minute lunch breaks, and letting them step away from the table for a few minutes if requested. In Minneapolis, workers were continually swapping jobs -- the two workers that make up each "table team" were switching between sorting ballots and reading them.

Occasionally, human error has been a factor -- but the recount rules leave room to correct for that. When workers finish counting an entire precinct, if the totals don't match the first count they must count the entire precinct again. If it still doesn't match, the campaigns can demand a third count.

"I've had to count a few precincts twice," Anderson said. "It is not fun."
The task is no less of a slog for the campaign volunteers. "I'm just going to stand up. I have to stretch my bad leg," David Erickson, a Franken volunteer, said at the Anoka recount site.

Both campaigns said they're trying to staff each recount site with enough volunteers to provide breaks. "We try to rotate people in and out to make sure they're fresh," said Marc Elias, attorney for the Franken campaign.

Fritz Knaak, attorney for the Coleman campaign, said "the fatigue issue is a problem" and could be a factor with the margin so close.

"We like to think that a hand count is more accurate than a machine count," Knaak said. "That isn't necessarily so."

Smith said many of the recount workers in Anoka County are city officials who had already been working extra hours the last few months to prepare for the elections.

"We're hoping to finish by early next week," Smith said. "It's Thanksgiving, and that's really motivating people to get this done."

As she discussed how she's trying to keep her workers fresh, Reichert -- the Minneapolis elections director -- stifled a yawn, then laughed.

"Is fatigue an issue? No," she said. "I just need more coffee."

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Norm Coleman was born in New York City in 1949. Al Franken was born in New York City in 1951.

(© 2009 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)