Who can you count on?

Marx said history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. Well, I'm not sure if the Florida 2000 recount wasn't already farce, but what's going on in Washington right now definitely is.

After counting the votes for a third time, Democrat Christine Gregoire has pulled ahead in the race for governor for the first time. By ten votes. Furthermore, 700 uncounted votes were discovered in a highly Democrat county.

A few observations.

First, even though discovering new ballots stinks to high heaven, I doubt very much the Democrats would have the nerve to pull a Chicago-style outright theft of the election. (As Edward G. Robinson put it in Key Largo: "Get my boys to bring the voters out. And then count the votes over and over again till they added up right...")

Second, there's some dispute over which kind of recount is better, machine or hand. Neither is. Machines are more reliable in most ways, but they make huge systematic errors that humans wouldn't. (I'm not impressed by the argument they're only as good as their programmers. A car's only as good as its designer and mechanic, but I'd rather drive it across the country than walk.) Also, if you decide to have laws where counters have to divine the desires of voters who don't follow the rules, humans are incomparably better. But when it comes to mind-numbing grunt tasks, machines are far faster and more accurate than humans. And unlike a properly designed machine, humans can have both conscious and, worse for our concerns, unconscious bias.

If I had to pick one method, I'd probably pick machines, just to avoid the possibility of political corruption. But I'd also have both parties check out those machines.

Third, some have suggested a re-vote. They say it's better for the legitimacy of the Governor to have a new vote than let the courts decide. This is nuts. Leaving aside the tremendous hassle and expense, why would a new election be better than the old one? And it's not the courts who decide the winner, it's the courts who decide what's the fairest way to count the votes to let the people decide the winner.

Fourth, I hope this isn't the continuing fallout of the voter paranoia started in 2000. I have no trouble in searching out and prosecuting actual voter fraud. But numerous recounts, new laws and court decisions that bend over backwards to give voters who screwed up another chance are a waste of time. If the margin of error is greater than the margin of victory, I almost don't care who wins--use the NBA rule on ball out if you like. After a certain point, keeping elections alive and insisting on counting every vote no matter what, simply introduces more chance for corruption, not less.

In the same way the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, followed by Vietnam and Watergate, turned too many Americans into overly cynical citizens who look for conspiracies when the explanation is out there in the open, now I fear we've got sore losers or fools or whatever who don't understand that, overall, we've got a pretty efficient voting system, and one that's probably cleaner than it's ever been.