Never mind the will of the voters

Norm Coleman, like Duhbya before him, is visibly willing to ignore what voters want in order to win an election. Essentially, they want the rule to be that Republicans take all statistical ties.

These Republicans don't give the slightest shit about legitimacy or the consent of the governed. This departure from the American democratic consensus is still shocking to me.

A margin of 206 votes among 2.4 million cast is without a doubt not definitive. If we've learned anything from the past decade of election controversies, it's that we do not have voting technology or human organizations that are capable of a low enough error rate to measure at a precision of one vote in 10,000.

The worst feature of our vote-counting systems is that we don't test them at all thoroughly. Every election should include post-vote audits. Some of these audits should recount every ballot. At least then we would know how inaccurate our elections might be.

That would be a good thing for a democracy to know.