Ballot Ontology

The US Presidential Election of 2000 was crucially decided in Florida. And, in Florida, the election might have been decided crucially by the question: is a dimple a hole? “Yes, it is”, so dimpled ballots are valid and ought to be counted. “No it isn’t”, and dimpled ballots must be rejected as invalid. If only one knew the answer! Where were the hole experts when we needed them? Eventually the manual recount was stopped by the Supreme Court. But we did learn something. We learned that even the destiny of a Presidential Election, if not more, might ultimately depend on one’s criteria for identifying holes—not their material surroundings, which everyone could detect, but the holes themselves.