Even before he ran for re-election to the Senate, Norm Coleman saw more than his share of ignominious elections. First he lost the Minnesota governorship to a former pro wrestler who called himself the Body. Then he just barely managed to wrest a Senate seat from an opponent, Paul Wellstone, who had recently perished in a plane crash. So can you really blame Coleman for having spent the last eight months furiously trying not to have to concede defeat to Al Franken — a man who once acted alongside a gorilla on the set of “Trading Places”? And yet all this protesting came at a real cost to the voters, because while Coleman was appealing his case to every Minnesota court that would hear it, his old colleagues back in Washington were actually grappling with some pretty consequential work — doling out a few trillion dollars in stimulus money and bailout funds. And through it all, the great state of Minnesota exercised only half the voice afforded the other 49 states. As they say in high-school locker rooms, Coleman refused to lose — even when it seemed clear that he had lost just the same.

Recounts and postelection wrangling are nothing new in America, of course. Reconstruction ended in the South because of a prolonged presidential standoff in 1876; Republicans ultimately got to keep the presidency, in the person of Rutherford Hayes, while Democrats extracted a promise to withdraw federal troops from the old Confederacy. Lyndon Johnson won his 1948 Senate primary only after the state Democratic committee voted to certify the ballots of dozens of loyal, albeit dead, voters. Such epic elections are often clouded by revelations of fraud, and yet the mundane truth is that American democracy is a little like your bathroom scale. If you want to know if you lost a pound or two, step on the scale and you’ll probably find out; if, on the other hand, you’re looking to find out whether you’ve lost an ounce, then the reading will vary every time you plant your feet. Similarly, no democratic system, with its vulnerability to human error and mischief, can be calibrated to function precisely within a certain margin of error. No matter how many new machines and monitors you deploy in the pursuit of perfection, some elections are always going to end in what is essentially a tie.

Image Source: The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, April 27, 2009. Credit... Illustration by Mr. Bingo

What is new are the lengths to which losing candidates will now routinely go — and the money the parties will spend — to avoid their certain fates. It used to be that when a candidate lost by a few suspect votes, the first question that arose was whether he would seek a rematch. Richard Nixon, who felt certain he’d been mugged in several states in 1960, exited quickly to begin plotting his return to office. Now, it seems, the first question anyone asks — at least since the 2000 presidential quagmire — is for how long you intend to fight the results in court. The governor’s race in Washington State in 2004 was disputed for eight months. More recently, the recount in a special election for Congress in New York dragged on for more than three weeks amid legal arguments over what did and did not constitute a valid ballot.