Proofiness - Charles Seife [64]
In a close election, one particular kind of proofiness, shared by Democrats and Republicans alike, is responsible for the worst lies in Coleman v. Franken as well as Bush v. Gore. And this form of proofiness all but guaranteed that these close elections would be decided the wrong way. As indeed they were. Only by ridding ourselves of it can we finally see who should have won the Minnesota election—or whether Bush should have ever been made president. That form of proofiness is disestimation.
Disestimation is the root of all the evils that came from the 2000 presidential election as well as the 2008 Minnesota Senate election. As long as there are close elections, disestimation will continue to exact a toll year after year, obscuring the truth. However, once you recognize the problem and see through the fog of disestimation, it becomes crystal clear how these elections should have been decided.
The first step is simply to admit that elections are measurements and are therefore fallible. Even under ideal conditions, even when officials count well-designed ballots with incredible deliberation, there are errors on the order of a few hundredths of a percent. And that’s just the beginning. There are plenty of other errors in any election. There are errors caused by people entering data incorrectly. There are errors created by people filling out ballots wrong, casting their vote for the wrong person. There are errors caused by absentee ballots that are wrongly excluded from the count, or illegal ballots that somehow make it into the mix. Ballots will be misplaced. Ballots will be double-counted. All of these errors make it harder to determine the truth of who really won an election.
Everybody knows about these errors, at least on some level. In Bush v. Gore the Court commented on how the dispute “brought into sharp focus a common, if heretofore unnoticed phenomenon”65 that the process of counting ballots was error-prone. Yet almost everybody completely ignores these errors. This is disestimation.
When the Minnesota secretary of state announced that Barack Obama got 1,573,354 votes and John McCain got 1,275,409 votes in the 2008 election, it was a case of disestimation. By presenting the number in that manner, the secretary of state made it seem as if this electoral measurement was much better than it actually was. The announcement is just as silly as the proverbial museum guide’s claim that a dinosaur is 65,000,038 years old. In fact, given the errors, the correct thing to say would be something like Obama won approximately 1,573,000 votes and McCain won approximately 1,275,000. This is the most accurate statement you can make about the election, given the magnitude of the errors in the tabulation process. (Even this is probably still implying too much precision.) However, because the margin between the candidates is so large, the point is moot.
With Franken versus Coleman, it was just as wrong for the secretary of state to declare that Franken had won 1,212,629 votes to Coleman’s 1,212,317. The proper thing to say was that both Franken and Coleman had each received approximately 1,212,000 votes. The Florida 2000 election was