Scanners only rejected 6000 ballots of nearly 3 million cast,  and that where the manual recount comes in. Now the humans look at those 6000 and try to determine the intent of the voter. Whether a human or machine does the count, errors will happen.

The recount to me means that Minnesota (and the rest of the country) should move to a manual ballot system, no machines at all. (Canada has done this for many years, and it’s not a Luddite attitude - computer professionals probably favor manual ballots more than laypeople do, because they know how many ways computers can go wrong, especially with so many people involved.)

Touch screens have proved themselves repeatedly to be unreliable, and ones without a paper trail are unthinkable. But optical scanners have their problems, too, between their own glitches and operator error. I was an election judge in a Twin Cities suburb, and we had to spend a lot of time getting the count straight after one of the judges fed the absentee ballots into the scanner too quickly. Many hours later, after analyzing everything, we ended up with only a few ballots having possible errors, with part of the problem due to mis-marking of some of the absentee ballots and their subsequent interpretation by the scanner.

The scanners require ballots to be marked in a certain way, with a fairly dark mark. The scanner can miss an intended vote, and in many cases will not kick the ballot back out for the voter to fix. It will kick out a ballot where it reads too many votes for a particular office, but it will not kick out a ballot when it “sees” no votes for a particular office. Some marks made are too light to be detected by the scanner, though a human reader would spot the mark right away.

It will be interesting to see how much the Coleman-Franken recount is different from the original machine-counted vote, and to find out why, to see how many intended votes were missed by the equipment.

If the machines turn out to have missed a lot of votes, that will discredit their use.

Maybe someone else has seen what happened in a recount in a previous election.

Comparing Minnesota to Florida is simply naive. The reason the Presidential race in Florida ended up in the courts was poor system, poor rules and poor administration of the above items. The reason the Senate race in Minnesota will end up being decided by the Senate is because Republicans will never want the Democrats to have 60 seats.

The best thing that will come out of this, is the best election system in the country will become better.