This kind of situation is arising more often in American politics and the only solution is to have run-off elections. If nobody gets 51%, then the top two should go at it again. Plenty of countries do it. That's how we should have handled the 2000 election.

Isn't the irony that (perhaps realizing was a shitty precedent it would be), the majority opinion-writers in Bush v. Gore sought to limit its use as a precedent?

As I recall (I'm certainly not about to review the primary sources at the moment) the majority opinion can be summed up as, "We made this decision, it's crap, but it gets our guy in, and no one can ever use it as precedent for any case, ever."

Norbiz, that's how things work in a banana republic.

The solution is not to have a revote. It is to have a ballot system that does not allow for interpretation. Many states, including WV, have them. Ours was a touch screen, with a paper trail that you could see beside the screen. Before pushing the final "vote" button, it recapped who you had indicated for each office. It did not allow you to overvote, and it let you know if you were undervoting, so you could correct it.

Please oh please oh please. Icing on the cake.

The ghost of Florida is freezing in MN.

FL 2000 MN 2008 and are night and day.

MN's laws are much clearer and much better, and their process has the intent of the voter as the highest value. They conduct everything in the open. It's the best election contest process I've ever seen.

All comparisons to FL 2000 should be treated with scorn and contempt.

It is rather unclear what the Coleman camp is expecting to accomplish by complaining that it's unfair for some counties to reconsider rejected ballots and others not, since the most likely outcome, if the court orders anything, is for them to order all of the counties to do it (most likely benefiting Franken.)

The most plausible speculation I've seen about the Coleman camp's legal strategy (from a commenter at 538, I think) is that they're just trying everything they can to delay the process while they try to come up with something that might actually work.

In the end, I don't believe Franken will have the votes. My call: Franken loses by 112 votes. -Kevo

Don't mess with Paul Anderson, who used to be the world's strongest man.....What? .... Oh, this is a different guy?.....Never mind.

kevo,

Fivethirtyeither, the AP, and the Franken campaign all have him winning by a handful of votes. With explicit methodology to justify their estimates.

How are you arriving at the 112 vote loss? Posterior extraction? Really, I'm curious.

Posterior extraction. That's a good one. I never heard that before, but I am gonna steal it.
God I hope Franken wins. It would be so much fun having him in the Senate and getting Welstone's seat back.

Doubtful, your moniker says it all! Why do you question the poop I give you? Your response says it all, but I thought I'd throw a number out there just to second guess Fivethirty and the others! -Kevo

As long as the margin of victory is smaller than the margin of error, the loser should have enough class to bow out for the sake of governance rather than lawyer-game the system by demanding recount after recount until the errors stack up on his side.

Imagine if Nixon had as little class as Gore. With all the corruption in the Chicago machine and Sam Giancana's unions helping out JFK, Nixon could have held up JFK's victory for decades while the justice department investigated irregularities in that election.

Luther:

Nixon didn't bow out in 1960 out of "class." He did so for two reasons. Firstly, Republicans had initiated recounts in a number of states Kennedy won, and the recounts did not change the results anywhere (except in Hawaii, where they actually took the state from Nixon's column and put it in Kennedy's). Secondly, in Illinois (as you point out, one of the key states in Kennedy's victory) there was strong evidence of Republican vote fraud in downstate Illinois, as well as Democratic fraud in Chicago. It is not clear that Nixon was cheated either out of Illinois or out of the election.

As to Gore, spare me the sanctimony. No self-respecting candidate would be content to lose the presidency by a few hundred votes in one state. The problem with Gore was not that he was too aggressive, but that he wasn't aggressive enough and had a bad strategy--he should have pressed for a recount of every ballot in Florida. Media recounts after the election showed that if a full state recount had been conducted, Gore probably would have become president. Gore also shouldn't have worried about seeming "anti-military" and worked to throw out dubious military absentee ballots the Republicans pressured canvassing boards to accept, many of which appear to have been mailed after the election.

Can anyone doubt that if the shoe was on the other foot, the Republicans would have fought like hell to pull ahead in the Florida vote count? Do you seriously think they'd say "Well, it's within the margin of error anyway, so we can't know who really won. Let's bow out gracefully and let Gore become president"? If you believe that, I have a Brooklyn Bridge I'd like to sell you!

At the time Bush v. Gore was decided, I wondered whether the SCOTUS actually had the power to proclaim one of their decisions to be un-precedential (to coin a word).