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On October 25, 2002, Democratic Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota died, along with seven others, in a plane crash. He was due to debate Norm Coleman, his Republican opponent, in Duluth, Minnnesota, that same night, at the height of a Senate campaign which Wellstone was winning handily.

In the event, he was replaced as the Democratic standard-bearer by former Vice-President Walter Mondale, with just days to campaign before the election. Mondale lost to Coleman, the Senator perhaps most well-known to a British audience as the chairman of the Senate hearings who was taken apart by George Galloway in May, 2005.

"Now I know that standards have slipped over the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer, you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice," Galloway had castigated Coleman. It was a series of exchanges so well-known in the US that the taxi driver taking me weeks later from the airport to a conference I was attending in Louisville, Kentucky, delighted in regaling me with the tale when he learned I was from the same country as "Mr. Gallo".

"Mr. Gallo" went on to find a different sort of fame as a putative comedian on Celebrity Big Brother, which is kind of an odd coincidence when we consider the man who is currently hoping to bring the curtain down on Norm Coleman's Senate career. That man is iconic American comic, Al Franken. As things stand, Franken and Coleman are deadlocked in the middle of a recount process likely to award the Senate seat to one or other of the candidates by what may be the smallest margin since the 1974 New Hampshire race, where shifting recount tallies eventually led to a re-run of the entire election.

Coleman was ahead by 215 votes after the first count. Because this was less than half a per cent of the votes cast, a hand recount was triggered, but not before Coleman had claimed victory and said he would forego the recount if he was in Franken's place. The comic just laughed and the recount is now underway. With 68 percent of 2.9 million ballots counted, Coleman's margin stands as I write (Monday, November 24th) at 180 votes, which sounds on the face of quite promising for the Republican. This tally does not, however, include ballots that have been challenged by one or other of the candidates. These now number almost two thousand. Insofar as there is a current consensus of opinion, it is that Coleman will squeak out a victory. A sophisticated analysis of the likely outcome of the challenges, by statistician and election guru Nate Silver, in contrast, calls it for the Democrat by a handful of votes.

There is also the possibility that this election, like the 2000 US Presidential election, will not be decided by the voters at all, but by a panel of judges. In 2000, they split 5-4 in favour of George Bush. The jury's still out on whether they'll be needed this time. Meanwhile, the Betfair market is unable to split the two, with each available at [1.5]. Says it all!

Professor Leighton Vaughan Williams is the Director of the Political Forecasting Unit and Betting Research Unit of Nottingham Business School, Nottingham Trent University