A crisis of democracy, or something

With the impending inauguration of Democrat Christine Gregoire to the boring and cynical position of Governor of Washington State, after a much more exiting election than that office deserves, Republicans want a re-vote. They want it so bad they've made a website for it. To further show that their blood is boiling, the main page for the state party has been ransacked and festooned with angry reds and emphatic exclamation points.

RE-VOTE!, it says.

But why? For what purpose, and, most importantly, to what end?

Is it a 'crisis of democracy' that an election should be so close? Not really. The problem is not with the closeness itself, but with the electoral problems the small margin of victory has exposed.

All votes were not counted. A critical number of ballots were not counted correctly. A majority of us doubt the outcome.

These startling revelations and they have the support by Washington's next-to-most-recent Republican Governor, a man who left office when I was negative 4 years old.

Yet, with trepidation, I admit that what they say is true. Not merely true, but foundationally so. So true that the critique is not limited to one race in one state. It's true of all elections. There has never been an election in history in which all votes have been counted, and all counted correctly. Such a thing has never happened, and never will.

The election process isn't uniform, the sheer plurality of voting devices is staggering, not to mention that there is a separate counting and reporting protocol for each county, if not each precinct. The whole thing is overflowing with an impossible amount of interference by those moronic but lovable primates, H. Sapiens. As long as people are somehow involved in the counting process--from physically judging ballots to just feeding them into a machine--there are going to be problems that will never allow for a perfectly accurate gauging of public opinion. As long as there are human hands behind the scenes, regardless of how well-meaning, there will be errors and hence, a margin of error. With margins of error come the possibility of differing count totals--ah, but we only count twice when it's close, so we only notice what are systemic inadequacies at times like this. That is, when the margin of victory is under the margin of error.

But even if we made the system perfectly automated, wondrously human-free [which we won't in 50 years, let alone in time for this democracy-righting re-vote], even if we took our grubby little meathooks off the whole thing, there would still be humans on the front end--voting--to screw things up. To once more borrow from LeAnn Rimes: you can't fight the moonlight.

Even this seemingly large shift, from two-hundred-something pro-Rossi to one-hundred-something pro-Gregoire, a shift of three-hundred-something votes, represents just over a hundredth of a percent [.00012 or so] of all votes cast.

Now, with the revote, the Republicans promise, "One simple ballot style; One clear set of counting rules; with Everyone watching very closely. But how do they plan to do that, and why didn't they do it the first time? Also, everyone was already watching very closely the first time, and the second, and the third. What's the fourth going to change? There will still be errors, there will still be omissions, there will still be disgruntled voters and a losing side, the best they can hope for is that one side or the other would manage to re-get-out-the-vote enough to push the margin of victory outside the margin of error.

But if they don't, what's it going to be, another revote? This could easily go off into perpetuity, when it needs to die a nice, inauspicious death now. If Rossi ended that third count ahead, or if the tables were turned, and successive recounts showed him the victor after Gregoire had won the first two counts, I'd still want to see this end. I'd be typing through more tightly gritted teeth, but who won is irrelevant to the argument.

This is not a crisis of democracy, it's an inherent and unfixable systemic shortcoming.

We should focus money not on a revote, but on homogenizing and streamlining the process for next time, all the while realizing that no amount of effort is going to yield a perfect election. Ever.

Another week between updates, but this time I had a [computer] virus, I swear.