As mentioned earler baseball-stat nerd Nate Silver, who has become the nation’s most accurate election prognosticator. Two weeks ago he blogged an intriguing numerical breakdown of Al Franken’s odds of beating Norm Coleman in Minnesota’s ongoing U.S. Senate recount.

That column waffled a bit, but built a compelling case that Frank had nearly even odds of taking the prize.

No such equivocation today. On Silver’s 538.com site, Silver makes his case explicit. The headline reads, “Projection: Franken to Win Recount by 27 Votes.”

Silver gets there through means of what to this math dummy is a pretty dense regression analysis that I will not attempt to explain. Read the column yourself. He shows his work.

Silver acknowledges that the error bars on his analysis are relatively high, so the projection should be read only to suggest that Franken is the favorite in the recount by the slimmest of margins. Silver adds:

“Nevertheless, there is good reason to believe that the high rate of ballot challenges is in fact hurting Franken disproportionately, and that once such challenges are resolved, Franken stands to gain ground, perhaps enough to let him overtake Coleman.”

Despite Silver’s guarded optimism for a Franken victory, the Coleman margin has grown slightly over the last few days, from +167 Saturday to +180 tonight, according to a Star Tribune news graphic posted at 8:04 p.m. The recount is now 68 percent complete.

It gets interestinger and interestinger….