By Emily Cadei, CQ Staff

Republican incumbent Norm Coleman slightly extended his lead over Democratic challenger Al Franken as the vote recount continued in Minnesota’s undecided Senate race. But with about a fifth of the total votes still to be re-tallied after six days of hand-counting — and each side poised to challenge close to 2,000 ballots when the state canvassing board reconvenes in mid-December — a decision in the year’s closest Senate contest still is likely weeks away.

By close of business Tuesday, Coleman had gained a net total of 23 votes, according to the office of Minnesota’s secretary of state. With approximately 81 percent of the ballots recounted, Coleman now leads Franken by 238 votes, up from the 215-vote margin he held at the end of the initial count that began on election night.

Minnesota’s automatic recount law was triggered when preliminary tallies of the 2.9 million ballots cast Nov. 4 showed Coleman with 1,211,590 votes and Franken with 1,211,375 — a margin of .007 percent.

Coleman, even with the small net gain he currently holds, still has a razor-thin overall lead over Franken. So it seems certain that the winner will be determined by the canvassing board’s rulings on the ballots each candidate is challenging. Through close of business Tuesday, monitors from the two campaigns had challenged a total of 3,594 ballots — with 1,758 of the challenges leveled by Franken’s campaign and 1,836 by Coleman’s.

The board will convene Dec. 16 to begin tabulating the results of the recount. The board aims to review all challenged ballots by Dec. 19.

Meanwhile, the canvassing board is scheduled to meet on Wednesday to consider another key ballot counting issue: whether or not to conduct a review of rejected absentee ballots and include in the recount those that are found to have been incorrectly cast aside.

The Franken campaign filed a brief with the board last week urging it to consider such a move, reporting that it had received data on more than 6,400 rejected absentee ballots from all or parts of 66 out of Minnesota’s 87 counties. In an election this close, the inclusion of even a fraction of those ballots into the vote count could shift the final outcome.

The Coleman campaign has countered, though, that including these ballots would buck legal precedent and that any challenges to rejected absentee votes should be handled by the courts.