The Wall Street Journal editors are tracking the recount in the Minnesota Senate race between incumbent Norm Coleman and Democrat challenger Al Franken, who trailed Coleman by 725 votes on Election Day. They think something fishy is going on.

Coleman’s lead has shrunk to 206 votes. Proportionally, the recount hasn’t resulted in the same gains for other Democrats in the state.

According to conservative statistician John Lott, Mr. Franken’s gains so far are 2.5 times the corrections made for Barack Obama in the state, and nearly three times the gains for Democrats across Minnesota Congressional races. Mr. Lott notes that Mr. Franken’s “new” votes equal more than all the changes for all the precincts in the entire state for the Presidential, Congressional and statehouse races combined (482 votes).

This entire process is being overseen by Democratic Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, who isn’t exactly a nonpartisan observer. One of Mr. Ritchie’s financial supporters during his 2006 run for office was a 527 group called the Secretary of State Project, which was co-founded by James Rucker, who came from MoveOn.org. The group says it is devoted to putting Democrats in jobs where they can “protect elections.”

WSJ doesn’t traditionally traffic in far-flung theories, so it might be time for some reporters to start digging deeper into this race that could tip the Senate even more Democrat. Before the election, Politico wrote about an administrative “Dem firewall” in closely contested states, where Democrat secretaries of state oversee election results, as is the case in Minnesota.

With a Democrat now in charge of the offices, which oversee and administer their state’s elections, the party is better positioned than in the previous elections to advance traditional Democratic interests —such as increasing voter registration and boosting turnout — rather than Republican priorities such as stamping out voter fraud.

Perhaps more important, in those five states Democrats are now in a more advantageous position when it comes to the interpretation and administration of election law…

Election officials don’t expect the contest to be resolved until mid-December, and Franken, who has a whopping 1,250 lawyers on the job, just filed a lawsuit today that adds a twist to the process.