They say that you have to visit Las Vegas, the empire of casinos and games of chance, even if it is only once and it only serves to flee from a place that openly appeals to greed and base instincts.
It’s called the sin city for a reason, the city of sin.
However, this enclave of the Nevada desert also represents something as typical of this country as the dream of getting rich by a stroke of luck.
Without thinking that the bank always wins, there are many who undertake that vacation trip with the unspeakable illusion of returning home with an account full of dollars instead of staying with a looted wallet at roulette.
That spirit of the player expands throughout the geography and that explains the recent decision they made in a small town in Wisconsin, back in the Midwest, a place that is more characterized by praying for the forgiveness of all those sins that are attributed to the strays from Vegas, as usual this city is cited, without the article.
So where politics does not arrive, then the resource of the casinos is used. You have to think of a solution in the style of penalties that break a tie in soccer. But this is America.
The two candidates for president of the Sister Bay Township governing board drew the same number of votes. Summon the voters again?
What a nuisance, the electoral managers must have intuited. They saw the light and resorted to dice, possibly the most innovative solution known to settle a matter of this type.
The two contenders, Rob Zoschke and Nate Bell, each received 256 votes from Sister Bay residents participating in this contest.
We had to go to the tiebreaker. The town secretary, Heidi Teich, had an idea. She informed the two candidates that the election would be resolved through a game of chance, according to the state code, without making it clear what it was.
“Is what I’m seeing correct?†Bell recalled saying to himself when he learned the count was 256 to 256.
Several options were raised. One could be to write the respective names on a piece of paper, deposit them in a hat and have an innocent hand take one out. Other options were choosing a card or chopsticks in which one was longer or simply flipping a coin.
But the three election officials ultimately decided that a roll of the dice was “the fairest method.”
This is a political mutation: instead of voters, gamblers.
“They had the feeling that if you flip a coin and one candidate chooses one side, the other has no choice but to choose the other side,” Teich explained to the BBC. “In a roll of the dice, both can participate in some way on equal footing,†he added.
To provide even more impartiality to the matter – imagine that one is one of those who leaves his salary in a machine in Las Vegas and the other arrives and takes the fat man with a single dollar – neither of the two candidates could attend the game in person, so two members of the electoral board were in charge of throwing the dice. Zoschke, who was running for reelection, followed the tiebreaker via Zoom. He witnessed their 6-2 loss to Bell, who had been tagged as the favorite before the election.
“It has attracted a lot of attention because this measure is not common,” remarked the secretary. “It is something unique to resort to a child’s game,” she insisted, eluding the shadow of the casino in her statements.
Once the game was over, Teich sent a photograph of the result to each of those involved.
Half a dozen supporters came to Zoschke lamenting the defeat. One complained that her teenage daughter couldn’t vote because she had a doctor’s appointment and another that she only managed to leave work when the polling station had already closed. The loser accepted her fate and assured that he will not ask for the count.
“I am at peace with myself,” he said. In any case, he pointed out that there were 78 census takers who did not vote. Bell, the winner, made a request. He requested the dice as a souvenir. Long live Las Vegas!
