In 1978, I was a junior in high school, and there was a complex and heated struggle over which song to select as the junior prom anthem. It was a huge deal. I should add here that the two teachers advising us were adamantly anti-Meatloaf. Only once they were gone did the advisors call the vote. And of course, they refused to honor the proxies the Vo-Tech kids had left behind, insisting that you had to be physically in the room to have a voice.
Every year there's a different high-profile national dispute over counting itself.
Last year, it was Florida, and whether we would count late military absentee ballots or the ballots of Holocaust survivors horrified to learn that they had voted for Pat Buchanan. And for the last several years, there's been a running dispute about how the US Census should do its work. Democrats have been pushing to augment the census with statistical sampling. They argue that a significant number of low-income voters go uncounted every ten years, for all kinds of reasons, maybe because they have no fixed residence or because they're afraid to answer pollsters' questions. Sampling can correct for this error.