Eric Kleefeld December 8, 2010, 9:23 AM

The Minnesota gubernatorial race is expected to come to an end today, five weeks plus one day after Election Day, with Republican state Rep. Tom Emmer reportedly to concede defeat to Democratic former U.S. Sen. Mark Dayton.

The news was first reported by KSTP, the local ABC affiliate in the Twin Cities area, and has also been confirmed by the Star Tribune. Emmer has an announcement scheduled for 10:30 a.m. CT. This election follows the disputed Minnesota Senate race from the 2008 cycle, which lasted for eight months of counting and litigation — but this current race always seemed likely to take much less time, because even its close margin of about 9,000 votes was far wider than the Senate race that came down to just a couple hundred votes.

Going into the recount, Dayton led by 8,770 votes, or 0.42%. While this was within the 0.5% needed to trigger a statewide recount, many observers doubted from the start that Emmer could have pulled ahead — including Fritz Knaak, a former lawyer for Norm Coleman. By comparison, the 2008 Senate recount and litigation resulted in a net change in the margins of only a few hundred votes. However, a possible drawn-out legal contest could have resulted in Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty staying in office in the interim, with the opportunity to work with a newly elected Republican legislature.

According to KSTP’s sources, the clincher for Emmer’s decision was yesterday’s decision from the state Supreme Court, which seemed to completely cut off a possible attempt to contest the result based on precincts where there were more ballots than the number of people who signed in on the register. The court upheld the state and local administrative practices of verifying these numbers based on poll worker-issued voter receipts. (Note: Small differences of this kind are not necessarily a product of systematic or even individual fraud, but can happen for various reasons of human error.)

Over the past several days, the Emmer campaign had withdrawn nearly all of its challenges of ballots in the recount. Most of them had been deemed frivolous by the local officials at the counting tables — and which even before the withdrawals, were not enough to pull ahead of Dayton.

At today’s State Canvassing Board meeting, in which the board is scheduled to adjudicate remaining ballot challenges, the Emmer campaign is expected to withdraw all of its remaining challenges. Assuming that Team Dayton follows suit, this would leave the board with only its regular administrative tasks of tabulating and certifying the vote totals, and declaring a winner — in this case, Mark Dayton.

2010 elections, MN-GOV, Mark Dayton, Tom Emmer