Proofiness - Charles Seife [63]
Some of the equal protection concerns were valid. Our democracy is plagued with problems caused by votes being given different weights (more on this in the next chapter). However, the problems outlined in Bush v. Gore could have been remedied by coming up with a uniform, reasonable, and practical set of standards for conducting the recounts. This the Court deemed impossible. Thus the Court ruled, “It is obvious that the recount cannot be conducted with the requirements of equal protection and due process” without doing impractical and, frankly, idiotic tasks like evaluating new software for the voting machines to get them to pick out overvotes. Functionally, the Court was ruling that manual recounts of any sort where two different election judges might disagree about the intent of a ballot are unconstitutional. It was a jaw-dropping ruling that threw a huge monkey wrench into our electoral process: it essentially made all recounts—and any other electoral processes that might not be 100 percent objective or consistent—unconstitutional.63
This is proofiness. The Supreme Court was deliberately ignoring the errors inherent in determining the victor of an electoral contest. No matter how careful we are, there are going to be mistakes in counting and tabulating ballots. Since we are human beings, we are never 100 percent consistent or objective when making judgment calls in elections. The Minnesota election proves that even in the best-designed recounts with the most prescriptive of laws, there will be counting errors, and some oddly marked ballots will cause even the most reasonable and rational people to fight about how to interpret them. There’s no clearer proof that the Supreme Court’s insistence on perfect objectivity is misguided. It’s delusional to pretend that elections can ever be perfect. They’re sloppy affairs by their very nature. We’re just lucky that most of the time the outcome of an election is clear enough to be visible through the muck.
When it isn’t, all bets are off. Close elections are, by their nature, vicious affairs. Candidates make noble speeches all the while trying to steal the election from their opponents with whatever lies are most likely to sway the public. They use lawyers and government officials and judges to fight partisan battles. Even the most august institutions in the land—such as the Supreme Court—have given in to the temptation of bartering their credibility to assure a candidate’s victory.
Even when the courts and judges behave admirably, a close election is certain to mean a tremendous waste of time and money. The state of Minnesota spent thousands of dollars during the recount, while Coleman’s and Franken’s campaigns spent tens of millions. Minnesota’s citizens were missing a senator for eight months before the issue was resolved. It could have taken longer had Coleman appealed all the way to the Supreme Court as Gore had, but after losing his claim in Minnesota’s highest court, he conceded. Eight months after the election, Minnesota no longer was shy a senator.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Mathematicians have ways of dealing with uncertainty. They can take even the closest, nastiest election and come up with a way of determining the victor in a manner that’s fair to all the parties involved. Instead, close elections wind up in the hands of lawyers. At that point, the outcome is essentially arbitrary. Who got more ballots is almost irrelevant to the outcome. The winner is determined by luck, by lawyers, and by proofiness.
A close election is the ideal breeding ground for proofiness of