leftfielder.org

There is a great op-ed in today’s New York Times. The gist of it is that there is the Minnesota Senate race is so extremely close–a couple hundred vote difference out of almost three million votes cast–that their is no humanly way possible of knowing who actually received the most votes. Any vote count taken will, by simple human error, be a few hundred votes off; meaning that every recount could potentially give a different result. Therefore, the state should just declare the election a tie and flip a coin to decide a winner.

I wholeheartedly agree. The whole recount process–assuming that thousands of new votes are not suddenly unearthed and that massive voter fraud is not discovered–is simply an extremely expensive coin-flip anyway. There is about a fifty-fifty chance that each candidate wins, and it entirely depends on which candidate “human error” favors; and unbiased human error is likely to favor each of them about half the time. So we should just save everyone the time, effort, and money; flip a coin and get it over with.

One need only look at the fiasco that was Bush v. Gore–and the fundamental erosion of faith in the American electoral and judicial systems represented by that case–to see the danger of supposedly “unbiased” recounts. The fact of the matter is that sometimes, elections will tie. A system that acknowledges that tie is just flat-out better than a system that insists, beyond all reason, that someone won.