PALM BEACH COUNTY--
At some point there will be exact, official counts for every precinct, county and state. From those counts we'll be able to confidently elect a president and know that though the election was close, the result followed the will of the people. Unfortunately, more so than in perhaps any previous presidential election, that confidence will be based on illusion. If we look at the election process from a scientific perspective, we can see the choice made for the next president will be arbitrary. In this essay, I'm avoiding many problems inherent in the current system in properly reflecting the will of the people, such as levels of voter turnout, the questions of the legitimacy or appropriateness of the electoral college, and disenfranchisement of segments of the population. We accept that by "will of the people" we mean "vote of the electoral college system based on the votes cast by citizens on Election Day."
The current system simply can't handle extremely close results. There's an inherent margin of error in the current voting system. If the margin of victory is within that margin of error, the victory is in fact arbitrary. Every single state had problems with the voting; in New York, there were broken polling booths, misinformation given out by polling place volunteers, affidavit ballots given out instead of emergency ballots, etc. Analogous problems exist in every single state. Fortunately, we live in a country where fraud and corruption are not the most likely suspects for such "irregularities," as they're currently being labeled. These irregularities give the system some margin of error. Of course, everyone's goal is to keep it as small as possible, but there will always be a non-zero number of miscast or miscounted votes. The vast majority of the time in the admirably stable and well-run American system, the irregularities will affect less than 0.5% of the votes. Any margin of victory greater than that is a safe one. Lower than that, and the victory is questionable.
Unfortunately, the current margin of victory in the Florida election is approximately 0.02%. The current margin of error is approximately 0.3% (assuming 20,000 incorrect or questionable votes). We're screwed. Let's pretend that the election is a scientific experiment. We estimate a margin of error, then run the "election" experiment, and we find that our calculated results are within the margin of error. We recheck the execution of the experiment, and we discover that the margin of error is even larger than originally estimated. What do we do? We can recalculate the results, but as good scientists, we know that our results are never going to be scientifically valid. If we try to factor in our new realizations about problems in the experimental method in the recalculation, we'd be guilty of scientific fraud, massaging the data. Having other scientists look at the data may help, but even that won't let us make any statistically significant conclusions. We have to re-run the experiment.
What makes this situation even worse is that Florida isn't the only state whose results were within the margin of error. Iowa, Wisconsin, New Mexico and quite possibly Oregon and the national popular vote all may be within their respective margins of error. The electoral college actually does a much better job of minimizing error than a direct national vote by breaking up the vote into independent components. (For example, say the margin of error in Texas is super-high at 5%, but every other state has a margin of error of 0%. With the electoral college, that error has no effect because Bush's margin of victory in Texas was 21%. In a direct national election, 5% of the Texas vote translates to about 0.4% of the national vote, which is greater than Gore's margin of victory in the popular vote.) But the electoral college doesn't prevent this margin-of-error problem, as we so clearly see in the Florida situation.
So just know that the next president, no matter who it is, will be elected not by the will of the people, but by the vagaries of chance. This election will always be shrouded by the spectre of illegitimacy. Let's just hope that our next president serves well enough to shine through that shadow.
--Adam Brate, Sociotech Correspondent
November 9, 2000
