EDGE: GOLDSMITH VS. ZIMMERMAN

Finally, it's time to count the ballots. It doesn't take long, a few minutes at most. We all hold our breath. The manual recount was repeated three times, under strict supervision, and all three counts showed Zimmerman one vote ahead. Is this the moment of truth? I'm watching the floor under the machine, to see how many bits of "chad" — the card stock that is punched out to make a hole — fall out when running through the decks. Occasionally, in running through the vacuum-fed reader at high speed, a bit will be dislodged from a ballot. This is a problem with partially pre perforated ballots — and human beings who sometimes start to punch out one location and then change their mind. As Larry Olsen, the Republican observer, whispers to me when he senses what I'm thinking, "If chad falls out there's no way to put it back."

I count nine bits of chad on the carpet after all the ballots are run. The chad may just have fallen innocently out of the innards of the machine, it may have fallen out of any number of punch positions which had nothing to do with the city council race, or one or more bits might have fallen out of the Zimmerman-Goldsmith positions. Who knows? The seconds tick by, and I am acutely conscious at this instant that language and reality sometimes coincide: in the punched card universe a "bit" really is a bit, and Gregory Bateson's definition of information as "any difference that makes a difference" is true indeed, as we await the count of how many bits of difference between card and not-card have just passed through the Cardamation machine. Pete Griffin sits down at the PC, enters some commands, navigates through some dialog boxes, and a Hewlett-Packard laser printer begins to hum. It's a tie: 954 to 954. The statistics show one "overvote" — a ballot where both candidates have received a vote. Someone asks Goldsmith's representative if she would like to run the cards again. No.

The auditor consults the Laws of the State of Washington and announces that the election will now be decided by flipping a coin. The candidate who filed first — Goldsmith — gets to call it heads or tails. Three days later, Judge Moynihan tosses a 1921 silver dollar in the air. Goldsmith calls it tails — and wins. Goldsmith gets the seat on City Council, while the Judge awards Zimmerman the coin. The "Logic and Accuracy" decks go back, under seal, to the Secretary of State. We live in a binary universe — and what isn't governed by logic is governed by chance.