[A great op-ed](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/04/opinion/04seife.html?ref=opinion) in today’s New York Times discusses the possibility of Minnesota’s senate race between incumbent Norm Coleman (R) and Al Franken (D) ending with a coin toss.

Even if all missing ballots are found and all the typos are corrected, the recount is still doomed. Just considering precincts where every ballot is accounted for — where Coleman and Franken observers are not challenging votes — there are mistakes. How can we know this? Before the recount began, the state ran a post-election review to gauge the accuracy of the voting process. The review involved auditors going into select precincts and, like the recounters, counting by hand, doing the most careful job humanly possible. So in some precincts, we have not just a recount but a re-recount. Both auditors and recounters were hypervigilant to possible sources of error, and yet they disagree on their tallies by about 20 thousandths of a percent. The Coleman-Franken race is so close that this error rate is more than double the margin between the two camps. Luckily, Minnesota’s electoral law has a provision for ties. After all the counting and recounting, if the vote is statistically tied, the state should invoke the section of the law that requires the victor to be chosen by lot. It’s hard to swallow, but the right way to end the senatorial race between Mr. Coleman and Mr. Franken will be to flip a coin.

The title is appropriately, “Not every vote counts.”