When out of hundreds of thousands or millions of votes an election comes down to a few thousand or even a few hundred disputed votes, what should be done? It’s probably a myth that there’s such a thing as a perfect count, and close elections can easily be within any reasonable margin of error. Modern marketing research has shown that things as trivial as the order of the names on ballots can swing fractions of a percentage. The best voting machine systems we have still can’t give us a perfect yes/no binary decision on how ballots are marked. And disputes over voter eligibility are a debate in themselves. Should we have some official “too close to call” rule that can be invoked that could fairly decide elections?
And if you do have an official “too close to call” status, what do you do with it then? And what if the vote is very near the threshold of “too close to call”-- How do you decide if it is indeed within that threshhold?
This comes down to a classic problem known as Buridan’s Ass.