Chad Faces The Gallows Again
I didn’t realize until I read this article what a monumental mess the “hand recount” of the votes in Washington’s governor’s race will be. Three-person teams will be assigned something like 11,000 ballots to count, under the beneficent gaze of “observers” from both political parties. In precincts where touch-screen voting was used, ballots will be printed out, one vote per page, and hand-counted. Raise your hand if you think they’ll come out with the same 42-vote margin.
I began to realize that the idea of a “winner” in this race is more a philosophical, chimerical concept than a mathematical one:
“There is a margin of error in connection with any measurement system, whether we’re counting fish in a lake or counting votes for a governor,” said Kirk Wolter, a statistics professor at the University of Chicago who did research on what happened in Florida during the 2000 presidential election.
It’s startling to me to look at the electoral process as approximate, asymptotic, rather than precise. A poli-sci professor in the article said
“You folks would do as well to flip a coin as to try to determine who actually won.”
I suggested as much last week, and I’m more inclined, seriously, to see it settled with that simple arbitrary, binary mechanism.
And it’s still hard for me to reconcile that the state that voted for John Kerry and Patty Murray also voted for Dino Rossi. And the answer might just be, as Knute Berger in the Seattle Weekly wrote:
One almost certain legacy is that her campaign’s incompetence has jeopardized other Democrats by validating the GOP strategy: U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell is in serious trouble in 2006 if she draws a Republican opponent who can match her money and her centrism and has a campaign message that connects with voters. The wonkish Cantwell, like Gregoire, is vulnerable as a smart insider who loves policy details but has little ability to paint the big picture for the folks back home. It’s one reason she lost her House seat to another faux GOP moderate, Rick White, in 1994. And there might be sexism at work, too: The GOP has discovered that tough ladies are vulnerable to soft soccer dads.
I thought Murray would be by far the most vulnerable of our two senators, but perhaps we’d better shake off our torpor and start working for Cantwell.
