Electing Our Leader: Room for Improvement; No 'True' Winner
Published: November 24, 2000
To the Editor:
Re ''We're Measuring Bacteria With a Yardstick,'' by John Allen Paulos (Op-Ed, Nov. 22):
When Mr. Paulos sardonically suggests breaking the Florida deadlock with a ''commemorative Gore-Bush coin'' flip, he elegantly captures the ugly, inescapable reality of this election. No amount of vote-counting or recounting can ever produce a ''true'' winner when the margin of victory falls well within the margin of error -- even with the best tabulation methods available.
In the absence of an impartial procedure for breaking this statistical dead heat, we are left with a scorched-earth struggle between partisan factions, each seeking to install the next president through the triumph of raw political power while cynically invoking ''the rule of law'' and ''the will of the people.''
In an election ironically reduced to genuinely fuzzy math, would a coin flip really be less legitimate?
Watertown, Mass., Nov. 22, 2000