Proofiness - Charles Seife [65]
All of the angry battles over a few hundred votes here and there are pointless; they’re fights over a complete fiction. The Coleman-Franken battle about whether one won by 206 votes or the other won by 312 is equivalent to two museum guides battling over whether the dinosaur is 65,000,038 or 65,000,019 years old: the outcome has no bearing on reality. All the arguments over absentee ballots, hanging chads, and the like are a complete waste of time; they’re merely a side effect of the proofiness that almost everyone is complicit in. We’re all complicit because nobody wants to face the truth.
And the truth is this: the Minnesota 2008 Senate race was tied. Both Franken and Coleman got the same amount of votes, at least as best as we humans can tell with the instruments we have at our disposal. The winner of the 2000 Florida presidential race? Nobody. Bush and Gore got the same number of votes, to the best of anybody’s knowledge. That race too was tied. The counting methods available to us do not allow us to give any answer more precise than that, so any answer other than that is a fiction—it is mere proofiness.
Nevertheless, everybody buys into the myth that those last few hundred votes that separate Bush and Gore or Coleman and Franken are meaningful. Government officials do it because they don’t want to admit that their ability to count votes is limited. Reporters do it because they crave certainty; if presented with approximate data, they’d try, against all logic, to figure out the real victor.66 Political candidates buy into the myth too—the person in the lead has every reason to pretend that his lead is more than mere illusion, while the candidate who trails has to pretend that there’s meaning in the handful of uncounted ballots that he fights for in court. All of these parties have their own reasons for clinging to the fiction of disestimation. As a result, none of the players who have the power to anoint the winner of an election—the government, the press, and especially the candidates themselves—will ever do the right thing and declare a close election to be a tie.
But that’s the truth of the matter. Clear the proofiness away, and it becomes obvious that the Minnesota and Florida elections were ties. And this reveals what the outcome of those elections should have been.
The Minnesota and Florida election laws each had a procedure for what happens in a tied election. In Florida, this procedure was described in the state’s statutes, title IX, chapter 103.162; in Minnesota’s election laws, it was in chapter 204C.34. Cut through the verbiage and it becomes apparent that both states, by coincidence, happen to break a tie in exactly the same way. In the case of a tie vote, the winner shall be determined by lot. In other words, flip a coin.
It’s hard to swallow, but the 2008 Minnesota Senate race and, even more startling, the 2000 presidential election should have been settled with the flip of a coin.
6
An Unfair Vote
It’s very hard in military or in personal life to assure complete equality. Life is unfair.
—John Fitzgerald Kennedy
I just received the following wire from my generous daddy: “Dear Jack, Don’t buy a single vote more than is necessary. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.”
—John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Elections are inherently unfair. No matter what method a government uses to run an election, it can’t be an equal contest, at least in a mathematical sense. It’s an inescapable truth: all elections are flawed, and there’s nothing we can do to fix them.
That’s the bad news. The really bad news: a number of politicians and judges are making our flawed