No Mulligans

Apparently Norm Coleman has decided that, since he lost in the Minnesota re-count and can't find a way to win in court, the thing to do is throw out the votes of 3 million Minnesotans and have a do-over:

"What does the court do?" Norm asked rhetorically. "Yeah, you know some folks are now talking about simply saying run it again, just run it again."

"Have another statewide election?" Wilkow asked.

Coleman responded: "You know the St. Paul Pioneer Press is...one of the second largest papers in the state, last week [they] said we're never going to figure this out, just run it again. So you start hearing that. Ultimately the court has to make a determination, can they confirm, can they certify who got the most legally cast votes?"

This is an astonishingly desperate move by Coleman, who has been pretty graceless throughout this process. Part of the problem here is that there's little incentive for him to not grasp at every straw. If he loses, not only is he no longer in the Senate, but under Minnesota law is potentially on the hook for the state's costs of the recount- which might be awfully hard to recoup as a private citizen.

The main problem here, as in Florida in 2000, is that in the US, elections are not really designed to be precise down to the last ballot. There are lots of moving parts, poorly trained election-day officials, and many opportunities for human error. When states have a recount option in close races, they try to measure the result with an unreachable level of precision- which inevitably leads to court fights and the losing side thinking it got screwed. Coleman on election night was up a few hundred votes, and now Franken is up a few hundred votes. Another recount could easily wind up switching the results again because recounts (like elections) introduce human error into the system. Ultimately I think the best option would be to nix the automatic recounts and let election night results stand absent clear and compelling evidence of fraud or significant error (like a precinct or a bunch of absentee ballots not being counted).