Several Deep Breaths Reco’d for Minnesota, Nation

As the nail-biter of a U.S. Senate race in Minnesota creeps forward — with Democrat Al Franken and Republican incumbent Norm Coleman stagnating in a soup of perpetual non-motion — the shadow of self-perceived disgrace lengthens. While I can’t source the comments now — a reminder that I should probably save/bookmark everything — I recall a number of recent reports quoting various Minnesotans who are “embarrassed” about their recount situation, which has been characterized by its repeated, back-and-forth challenges, mysterious missing ballots rediscovered, etc. One or more of the now-lost commenters suggested Minnesota would soon replace Florida on the recount walk of shame.

Puh-lease.

While it’s fair to argue that every state in the union should seek election-perfection, it’s equally fair to argue that this particular incarnation of the Platonic ideal won’t be achieved — ever — certainly not by human hands, nor by machine, nor by a combination of the two.

A week after the Nov. 4 election, Nate Silver offered this perspective:

In Minnesota’s 2006 senate race, the audit detected just 53 discrepancies out of 94,073 ballots tested, or an error rate of 0.056% … these are the cases of machine error only …

Taking that data point, let’s walk through a series of semi-reasonable but still entirely hypothetical assumptions:

1. Assume that human-only counting would produce an error rate of 0.112% — twice the machine-only rate.

2. Assume that a machine count combined with a validating human count would produce an error rate of 0.028% — half the machine-only rate.

3. Assume that the final Coleman-Franken discrepancy is 0.007% of total votes cast — comparable to what it was as of Nov. 15, when they were separated by 206 votes out of 2.9 million cast.

Net: The final votes separating the contenders could be four times less than the most conservative (0.028%) of our assumed “reasonable” rates of error. In other words, when an election is this close, there’s no reason to be embarrassed. You’re in the land of natural imperfection. Deal with it. And while you’re doing so, you might want to heed the advice of a commenter on this Minneapolis Star Tribune story:

It’s good that the election is close, it means that both candidates have qualities that the people respect. The polarizing aspect means people feel strongly about the candidate that they support … What is most embarrassing to our state is not that we have a close election but how we interact with one another as the process moves forward. For example it’s embarrassing to watch friends fight. Give these guys a break and lets keep it clean.

I’ll raise a glass to that.