Proofiness - Charles Seife [50]
“First name ‘Lizard’?” interrupted Cleary, incredulously.
Yes, indeed. A room full of hot-shot lawyers and eminent judges was engaged in a serious debate about whether Mr. Lizard People was a real human being. It was a hard-fought battle because the Minnesota election was so close that the answer might mean the difference between victory and defeat.
Even though extremely close elections bring out the most bizarre and irrational behavior that human beings are capable of, the lizard people question took even the most jaded election observers by surprise. It quickly became a symbol of how screwed up—how detached from objective reality—Minnesota’s election had become.
Most elections are reasonably rational and genteel affairs, at least once all the votes have been cast. Sure, attack ads might pollute the airwaves for months before an election, and candidates will hurl nasty rhetoric at each other, but after the ballots are tallied, everybody agrees about one crucial fact: who won the contest. The loser gives a heartfelt concession speech full of hope mildly tempered with regret, perhaps sheds a few tears, and then congratulates the victor. No matter how vicious the fight, the battle ends as soon as the polls close. When the votes are finally tallied, everybody—even the loser—reaches an accord about the outcome. Most of the time.
When an election is extremely close, counting the ballots might not end the battle. That’s when lizard people begin to crawl out of the woodwork. Within hours of the polls’ closing, both sides accuse the other of trying to steal the election. The candidates and their lawyers maneuver for advantage, trying to find arguments that will secure victory even when they’re lacking a resounding mandate from the voters. Both sides attempt to weasel their way into office. This is the perfect environment for proofiness.
Indeed, Minnesota’s 2008 Senate election was ground zero for electoral proofiness, just as the 2000 presidential election in Florida was nearly a decade earlier. Minnesota, like Florida, was soon deluged with twisted arguments, distortions, and outright lies as both parties jockeyed for position.
In truth, there was a mathematically and legally correct way to settle the Minnesota and Florida elections fairly; unfortunately, the proper procedure was rather disturbing. The correct method for determining the victor of these elections happened to be the only solution that no candidate would ever have been able to embrace. As a result, the outcome of the Minnesota election, like the outcome of the 2000 presidential election before it, had absolutely nothing at all to do with logic or mathematical truth. These elections were determined by nothing more than proofiness.
It shouldn’t be this way. Elections should be foolproof by now. After all, we humans have been voting for more than two millennia. Ancient Athens, for example, regularly held plebiscites of all kinds, and their voting procedure was as simple as can be. Citizens would write names on potsherds and dump them in the marketplace. Magistrates would then count the potsherds, one by one, reading aloud the names inscribed upon them. Two and a half millennia later, voting is almost exactly the same as it was in ancient Athens. True, the technology has changed somewhat over the centuries. Instead of voting by writing a name on a piece of pottery, we do it by writing on a piece of paper or punching a hole in a card or flipping a lever in a voting booth or bubbling in a circle on a Scantron sheet. But fundamentally, the ballot is the same—it’s just in a slightly different form.46 Just as in Athens, the election is decided when humans get together (ostensibly) under the eyes of the public and enumerate the votes, one by one. Determining the winner of a vote is as simple as the act of counting; it’s as easy as one, two, three.
After twenty-five hundred years, you’d think that we would have figured out how to get this simple little procedure right. Yet even under