RELATED STORY: ‘Sore loser syndrome’ too prevalent in today’s politics

There’s this funny little thing called democracy that allows citizens to elect their leaders by voting for the candidates they think will best serve them.

Sometimes the process works smoothly: votes are counted and the one with the most wins. But other times, through this funnier thing called human error, mistakes are made and it isn’t perfectly clear who is elected.

So I guess when those errors happen we should just throw our arms in the air, shrug our shoulders, say, “Hey, mistakes happen,” and call it a day. No sense in wasting any time to sort out the matter, recount the votes, and make sure the candidate that the people chose to represent them is elected to the position. What an awful waste of time, ironing out the democratic process.

Contesting election results has gotten a bad rep. In the past decade or so, George W. Bush won an election after contesting votes in Florida — and we see how well the American people liked that in the end — and more recently, Norm Coleman accused some Minnesota precincts of double counting votes, and New York District 20 is just a big mess.

Their critics call them sore losers and say they are doing their constituents a disservice by leaving the seat vacant while protesting their defeats. But which is the bigger disservice: leaving the seat vacant for a couple of weeks or filling the position with someone the people didn’t truthfully elect to serve?

Coleman and the skew of Republicans in New York have every right to ask for a recount if they believe the votes were counted incorrectly.

There are exceptions, however. This fairness to democracy of course does not apply if they are just being sore losers. If the vote was 83,049,580,239,458 to 23, let it go. No one likes a sore loser.

The other exception — or possibly a situation of taking advantage of the democratic process — comes when the losing candidates pick their opponents apart searching for the mildest breaking of the rules. Best case in point can be found on our very own campus.

Last week, SG vice president-elect Kelsey Hayes was fined $25 for charging her cell phone close to a polling location after a complaint filed by one of her opponents. Now, I’m all for fairness in the democratic process. But unless that phone was transmitting subliminal campaign messages or had a “Vote for Smith and Hayes” ringtone, that complaint was a big waste of time.

Couldn’t the nit-picking stop after the debates? I mean, the girl had to charge her phone so she’d be ready to receive all of those “congratulations” calls after the entire school was convinced to vote for her via her secret mind campaigning. Technology is getting out of hand these days.

Contests like those just make everyone look bad. That isn’t democratic, that’s not wanting to admit you lost.

But in general, frowning on election contests or voting recounts is showing your ignorance of the democratic process. We stress the importance of voting to have your voice heard, but then we’re willing to put whomever in office simply for the convenience of it and the desire to avoid having to tally up the wishes of the American public one more time.

We’re just proving ourselves to be lazy Americans. Even democracy exhausts us.