In Dutch, unstressed vowels optionally reduce to schwa. Reduction of one unstressed vowel can be contingent upon the reduction of other unstressed vowels in the word. These facts bear on the resolution of ties in Noisy Harmonic Grammar (NHG), which produces optionality by perturbing weights on each evaluation. In the analysis developed here, illicit patterns of reduction are harmonically bounded; these candidates cannot win outright, but under the right combination of weights, they can tie with their bounders. Two ways of dealing with ties in NHG have been proposed in the literature. Under trial cancellation, evaluations that result in ties are discarded and attempted again with new perturbed weights, thus preventing Dutch's harmonically bounded forms from emerging. Under random selection, a winner is chosen arbitrarily from among the tied winners, thereby allowing harmonically bounded outputs. This paper argues that the particular facts of Dutch make ties likely and therefore favor trial cancellation over random selection.