THE Democrats may or may not capture the House or Senate tomorrow. But one thing appears certain: There will be a lot of close races where the results are uncertain late into the night (and perhaps even the next morning) and where the outcome may hinge on legal rulings about which ballots count and which donÂ’t. "Especially if you rubes vote incorrectly after we've told you a hundred times which candidate to choose!!"
After all, in the last few years, several statistical dead-heat elections have ended up in court. The mayoralty of San Diego and the governorship of Washington are just two of the more high-profile examples since Bush v. Gore in 2000 in which elections were decided by a few votes and whining and bitching about the result for years afterward controversy followed the winner into office.
The rub in these cases is that we could count and recount, we could examine every ballot four times over and we’d get — you guessed it — four different results. That’s the nature of large numbers — there is inherent measurement error. We’d like to think that there is a “true” answer out there, even if that answer is decided by a single vote. We so desire the certainty of thinking that there is an objective truth in elections and that a fair process will reveal it. |