By Emily Cadei, CQ Staff

The recount in Minnesota’s still-undecided Senate race is winding down. But the rhetorical battle between the contenders — first-term Republican incumbent Norm Coleman and Democratic challenger Al Franken, a well-known entertainer — is ratcheting up.

State elections officials had recounted 93 percent of the ballots cast in the Senate race as of Tuesday night, with Coleman holding onto his initial tiny lead. Franken’s hopes for victory now hinge on votes that have been left out of the recount, and his campaign has struck an increasingly aggressive tone on the need to include absentee ballots that it says were wrongfully rejected and ballots that were somehow missed during the initial canvass following the Nov. 4 election.

The recount was triggered after an unofficial tally of election returns showed Coleman leading Franken by just 215 votes out of 2.9 million ballots cast, a margin of .007 percent. Minnesota law requires a hand recount in any election for federal or state office in which the margin is less than one-half of 1 percentage point.

Reports from Minnesota’s Secretary of State showed that by Tuesday night, Coleman had gained a net of 88 votes, extending his lead to 303 votes.

Franken supporters have been quick to argue that this margin is inflated by the large number of ballots challenged during the recount. Combined, the two campaigns have challenged the counting of 6,003 votes — 3,093 by Coleman and 2,910 by Franken.

The state’s canvassing board is set to begin reviewing those challenges Dec. 16. Most are expected to be rejected as frivolous.

Franken attorney Marc Elias says the campaign’s internal recount tally, which includes challenged ballots based on unofficial rulings made by county election judges, shows Franken trailing by just 50 votes.

But an analysis by the Minneapolis Star Tribune over the weekend determined that to win the race on this basis alone, Franken would have to win more than 6 percent of his challenges and Coleman would have to lose all of his — a rate of success considered unlikely by some state elections analysts.

That has prompted Franken’s campaign to put a stronger focus on obtaining inclusion of uncounted ballots. The Franken campaign has been arguing for weeks that the recount should include a review of rejected absentee ballots — estimated to be close to 12,000 — and add to the candidates’ totals any that are found to have been wrongly rejected.

Elias estimated that could be as many as 1,000 of these ballots, though state officials have pegged it at half that or less.

On Tuesday, there were signs this strategy may yet pay off.

Today, the secretary of state’s office ordered county election officials to begin a review of rejected absentee ballots next week and set aside any found to have been incorrectly rejected. The counties still await guidance from the canvassing board on whether it can count these ballots.

The Franken campaign this week also reiterated its call to counties to investigate discrepancies between the unofficial Nov. 4 vote count and the number of votes recounted. The campaign pointed to three examples in which ballots appeared to have gone missing in the recount.