Proofiness - Charles Seife [68]
Arrow’s theorem proves that these three conditions of a perfectly fair election—“no dictators,” “unanimous vote,” and “faithful reflection”—are mutually contradictory. It’s mathematically impossible to have all three at the same time. This means that there is no such thing as a perfectly fair election.
In practice, elections fail the “faithful reflection” condition. They don’t give a simple tally of voters’ preference of one candidate over another; they’re much messier than that. Even though people preferred Ronald Reagan to Jimmy Carter, Carter theoretically could have won the election if an attractive third-party candidate also ran for president in 1980, splitting the Republican vote. If this happened, the “faithful reflection” condition would have been violated, because Carter would have won the election despite the populace’s preference of Reagan to Carter. In other words, elections are so complex that no matter what voting system we use, the “wrong” person might wind up being elected. This is just a fact of life, something that we’ve come to live with in a democracy. No matter what method we use to elect our officials, there is some level of unfairness inherent in the process. It’s inescapable.
Even though Arrow’s theorem ensures that no election can be perfectly fair, the level of unfairness is pretty mild. We’re not too disturbed by the idea of third-party candidates mucking up an election. Indeed, it’s part of what makes elections so unpredictable—and so interesting. However, Arrow’s theorem accounts for just a tiny fraction of the unfairness that plagues elections in the United States and around the world. There are much, much more worrisome problems with our electoral process—problems that are quite purposeful. Politicians are trying very hard to turn a mildly unfair voting system into something that’s mind-bogglingly unfair. Make no mistake: there are people who are attempting to undermine the very mechanisms of democracy in order to ensure that their ideological allies get elected—regardless of the will of the people. And they’ve got a powerful weapon in the struggle: proofiness.
People have been undermining democracy by tampering with our electoral system for years. In the United States, the tradition is almost as old as the nation itself. By the early 1800s, scheming politicians had already created a powerful—and legal—method for staying in office even when the public tried to vote them out. This method is named after a gentleman whose signature is on the right edge of the Declaration of Independence, not far below the signatures of his fellow Bostonians Sam and John Adams. His name was Elbridge Gerry.
Gerry became governor of Massachusetts in 1810, but his party, the Democratic-Republican, was becoming increasingly unpopular. He and his allies were losing ground to their rivals, the Federalists, and they were terrified of what the upcoming election of 1812 would bring. If the voters had their way, the Democratic-Republicans would be kicked out of the statehouse, leaving the Federalists in power. From Gerry’s point of view, this had to be avoided at all costs.
One of the powers of state government is to redistrict: to change the boundaries of voting precincts, altering which regions would be represented by which state senators. The Democratic-Republicans realized that if they got really creative with the way they redrew those boundaries, they could hold on to most of the seats in the state senate,