For once I find myself actually agreeing with something written by Stephen Jay Gould — flip a coin to determine who won the presidential election.
Thus, the mind rebels against a claim that Florida should be declared a true tie. Count them again, we say. Count them more carefully. Count them by a single standard. Count them by more accurate machines. Count them by the undeniably fairest method of human scrutiny for each ballot, no matter how long it takes. Count them and recount them until we know who won, even if the true difference comes down to a single vote.
But we never will, and never can know by this false standard of determinability. We can count for every metaphor of eternity, until Kingdom Come, hell freezes over, or the cows come home, and we will never know because the vote is tied by any achievable standard of measurement. Any method, machine or human, ineluctably embodies an intrinsic margin of error.
And the way true ties are usually decided is through a random procedures such as a coin toss. Though the choosing might be considerably more dramatic if maybe we forced the two to play poker for the presidency (or how about chess? I’m sure millions of Americans are dying to know what opening W. prefers.)