THE lizard people have eaten a vote in Beltrami County. That’s not so strange in a recount like the one underway in Minnesota  voters do all kinds of inexplicable things like inscribing “lizard people” in the write-in slot, as one did, invalidating his ballot.

Much more alarming is that hundreds of votes have disappeared in the still too-close-to-call Senate race between Norm Coleman, the Republican incumbent, and Al Franken, the Democratic candidate. The missing ballots expose a fundamental flaw in our way of doing elections  one that proves the recount in Minnesota is futile.

Before the recount began on Nov. 19, Mr. Coleman and Mr. Franken were within about 200 votes of each other. With a little under three million ballots cast in the election, that margin was unbelievably small: a few thousandths of a percent separated the two candidates. So, as Minnesota law requires, election officials began counting, by hand, every single ballot from the more than 4,000 precincts around the state.

Some missing ballots were misplaced: officials in Ramsey County  to their great embarrassment  discovered 171 uncounted ballots in a compartment of a voting machine. Some errors were typos: a clerical mistake wiped out 25 votes in Blue Earth County.