Nate Silver brings the math

With Coleman's margin cut to 180 votes and most, if not all, of the Franken heavy areas of the state to come in, some would say that Al has a pretty good chance of locking this big damn race up. Those people are amateur guesswankers, flogging their limp notions in shame. Nate Silver, he of 538.com and a man who personally has more book deals than you've had hot meals, has decided to end all debate with math. Maths + English. Nate ran the numbers, created some math algorithms, and punched those numbers, plus/minus signs, fractions, an cosines into his computron and popped out a number: 27 votes.

franken_net = t * 8.922 - 3.622

Now, we can attempt to solve this equation at the statewide level. When we plug in a t of .499956 -- Franken was picked on just slightly very less than half of the ballots during the initial count -- we get a value for franken_net of .837. That is, Franken will gain a net of .837 votes for every 10,000 cast. With a total of 2,885,555 ballots having been recorded in the initial count, this works out to a projected gain of 242 votes for Franken statewide. Since Norm Coleman led by 215 votes in the initial count, this suggests that Franken will win by 27 votes once the recount process is complete (including specifically the adjudication of all challenged ballots).

Of course he says, it's all subject to blah blah blah and might not be accurate blah blah, but the man has charts and equations. It's over. Franken wins by 27. Nate Silver is the math Gandalf.

And if Franken does win by 27, I'm burning Nate Silver as a witch. Fair warning.