More counting would presumably have resulted in a more accurate enumeration of the votes; but this, the court said, is not the overriding goal of an election. Recounting some counties but not others, they said, would be unfair to the voters whose ballots were not revisited. The proper business of the state is not to count the votes as accurately as possible—to know what actually happened—but to obey the formal protocol that tells us, in Hardy’s terms, who the winner should be defined to be.
