A nation (evenly) divided

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Tim Onosko <tim () onosko com>
Date: August 28, 2004 1:04:29 AM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Subject: A nation (evenly) divided

Dear Dave Farber:

I think  the great undiscussed issue is what to do with an election 
that ends in a statistical dead heat, and it is one for which there is 
obviously no Constitutional solution.  As Americans, the value of our 
votes is established by the admonition that a candidate can win or lose 
by a single vote: ours.  This is true, no doubt, in a race of limited 
scope, such as a local election.  But, on a national scale, it is 
always possible, as we saw in November 2000, to be cast into a 
situation like Florida, where no number of recounts may have ever 
yielded a satisfactory answer to who actually won the state.  The 
different ways recounts were ordered, the rules by which they were 
conducted, human error and the chaotic environment itself were likely 
to have meant that no two recounts would have been the same.  Anyone 
who has taken the most rudimentary statistics course recognizes this as 
the margin of error.

The U.S. Constitution makes no mention of how to solve such disputes, 
and so we were thrown into the worst kind of court case possible, where 
there was no precedent and precious little case law, and where the 
outcome was assured to be determined by lawyers, not the law.  Yet, 
considering all of the public furor over the 2000 election, there has 
been virtually no discussion about the underlying cause of the problem 
or how to settle it if it happens again.  Instead, we simply address 
the voting methods -- punch cards and hanging chads are out, optical 
ballots and e-voting are in.  But there remains a margin of error in 
every virtually voting and accounting method, and there is still no 
Constitutional remedy for the statistical dead heat.

With polls that reflect a still a frighteningly evenly divided nation, 
the possibility exists that some variant of the 2000 scenario might 
once again play itself out without any better legal method of settling 
matters.  We don't need to live through this nightmare again, where 
half the electorate inevitably feels disenfranchised for the next four 
years.

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