UPDATE 1-Minnesota Senate recount nears end: Coleman leads

(Updates with recount complete, official's comments)

By Todd Melby

MINNEAPOLIS, Dec 5 (Reuters) - A recount in Minnesota's U.S. Senate race between Republican incumbent Norm Coleman and Democrat Al Franken lurched to an inconclusive end on Friday with Coleman leading by just hundreds of votes out of 2.4 million cast for the two of them.

The outcome of the Nov. 4 election will not be final until as many as 6,000 ballots challenged by the two candidates are examined by a state canvassing board starting on Dec. 16. A court fight could follow.

Although Democrats have already claimed 58 out of the 100 Senate seats in the 111th U.S. Congress that convenes on Jan. 6, both parties have poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into the recount, with Republicans hoping to gain ground and Democrats hoping to increase their majority.

Even if comedian-turned-politician Franken wins, the Democrats would still be one shy of the 60-seat majority they need to end Republican procedural roadblocks.

The recount has swung back and forth between the two men, with batches of uncounted ballots being discovered here and there as well as clerical errors changing the totals.

With the recount virtually complete on Friday, Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie said Coleman led Franken by 787 votes. Local newspapers put Coleman's margin at about 200 votes, tallying ballots that had previously been challenged.

The vote count right after the election showed Coleman with a 215-vote lead.

Officials combed through a Minneapolis church where many college students voted and a warehouse where ballots were stored in search of a packet containing 133 missing ballots.

"It's just one packet, it's not very alarming," Ritchie, a Democrat, said in an interview with Reuters. The canvassing board can accept the precinct's original election night vote total as an alternative, he added.

"It doesn't surprise me there are a few bumps along the way," he said.

'SICK OF IT'

Coleman's side expressed concern about partisanship after Minneapolis' Democratic mayor, R.T. Rybak, appeared at a news conference to announce the search.

"People are sick of it, people want this over, this has been a long and nasty Senate race," said Steven Schier, a political scientist at Minnesota's Carleton College.

"Frankly, people don't much like either one of these candidates," he said, noting Coleman and Franken each got about 41 percent of the vote, with independent candidate Dean Barkley getting the rest.

Although the public may be tired of the sniping between the two camps, a Minneapolis Star-Tribune story that offered readers a chance to judge disputed ballots for themselves was the most popular on its website. (Writing by Michael Conlon and Andrew Stern; Editing by Peter Cooney)