Arbitrary, Capricious & Fair

The best resolution to this election would look something like this:

Chief Justice Rehnquist, wearing his judicial robes, walks to the 50-yard line of the Orange Bowl in Miami carrying an oversized coin. On his right would be Al Gore, flanked by a team of trial lawyers, and on his left, George W. Bush, accompanied by three members of his father's Cabinet. Rehnquist would toss the coin. The TV cameras would track its flight in super slow-mo and zoom in on its face as it landed in the grass. And there, the election would be decided.

This would be the best approach, not because it would be the fairest, but because it would be the most arbitrary--and therefore the most accepted.

It is human nature, or at least American nature, that we often are more likely to accept an outcome if it seems directed by a mysterious force rather than a knowable human. In part this is because we are a religious people. For many, a coin's trajectory would be guided by a force much higher than the Broward County Canvassing Board.

But this bias says as much about our attitude toward other humans as our attitudes toward the Creator. We distrust the motives of people, so we seek beings that have no motives, which pretty much limits the field to inanimate objects.

Think about the Bush campaign's argument against the manual hand recount: It's not that machines are more accurate but that they're more fair. Indeed, their inaccuracy is now well established; thousands of non-controversial hanging chads--clearly demonstrating a vote--were not counted by the machine. Humans have tried fixing those mistakes and in the process may be making mistakes of their own. But even if those manual recounters get it wrong half the time, their recount would still be 50% more accurate than the machine count.

And yet hand counts make us uncomfortable because of the possibility that human mischief could creep in. As James Baker put it, machines are not Democrats or Republicans.

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