With only mistakenly rejected absentee ballots left to tally in Minnesota’s U.S. Senate recount, Democrat Al Franken has a 50-vote lead over Republican U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman.

The lead, Franken’s largest since Election Day, buoyed the Franken campaign.

“We are absolutely thrilled with where we stand,” said Marc Elias, Franken recount attorney.

The Coleman campaign was less than thrilled.

“We’re faced with an artificial Franken lead,” said Coleman recount attorney Tony Trimble. The Coleman campaign has all but promised it will contest the election results in court because it believes more than 100 votes from Franken-friendly areas were double counted.

The 50-vote lead is provisional because there are still rejected absentee ballots to count.

Those absentee ballots, which local election judges mistakenly didn’t count, are the latest focus of recount controversy.

In deciding a suit brought by the Coleman campaign over the absentee ballots the state Supreme Court ordered that mistakenly rejected absentee ballots could be included in the recount — but only if the two campaigns agree they should on a ballot-by-ballot basis.

While local officials believe there are about 1,350 wrongly rejected ballots, it’s not clear how many ballots the campaigns will actually send to the state for counting.

Over the weekend, the Franken campaign had said it would be willing to have all those sent to the state.

This week, the Coleman campaign said it wanted officials to send about 780 of those to the state and examine another 550. Additionally, the Coleman campaign said there are another 654 ballots that should be counted but local officials didn’t include them on their list of about 1,350.

But, according to the Secretary of State’s office, the Coleman campaign didn’t get that list of 654 ballots to local officials by 3 p.m. yesterday which was the deadline to produce lists of additional ballots.

Trimble, of the Coleman campaign, said Deputy Secretary of State Jim Gelbmann would not allow those additional ballots to be counted, proving himself joined “at the hip with Al Franken.”

The absentee mess has meant that today, in at least some of the regional counting sites, which were to sort through ballots and send them on to the state, no counting is going on.

“Things are not going as smoothly as we hoped,” Gelbmann said. He said that in St. Louis and Anoka counties, at least one campaign representative is refusing to begin the count because the campaigns had not agreed on the universe of ballots to be counted.

Rachel Smith, Anoka County elections supervisor, said in her county, which was also slated to deal with the absentee ballots from Isanti County, Coleman and Franken representatives had “mutually exclusive” demands.

The Coleman campaign would not participate in forwarding the ballots unless additional ballots — other than the one’s the county identified as mistakenly rejected — were included. The Franken campaign wanted only to include ballots the county had identified.

As a result, neither Anoka’s identified 35 mistakenly rejected ballots or Isanti’s six or seven were forwarded to the state.

“We obviously would like those votes to be counted,” Smith said. “But we also recognize that there is a process and we want to be following that process.”

In Beltrami County, the sorting of absentees was completed this morning.

Kay Mack, Beltrami auditor/treasurer, said the campaigns and county officials today agreed to send seven absentee ballots to the state. The county had identified another ballot it believed was mistakenly rejected but the Coleman campaign official there disagreed so that ballot will not be sent to the state.

The sorting of ballots is slated to continue in different locations across the state through Wednesday.

All agreed upon ballots are supposed to be sent to state offices for counting by Jan. 2 and counted by Jan. 4.