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jeannecurran@habermas.org
Latest update: December 1, 2000
Created: November 10, 2000
"There is no such thing as a perfect election."
NY Times, Friday, November 10, "No Clear Answers to Florida Election's Legal Questions," by William Galberson."There is no such thing as a perfect election," said David Cardwell, an Orlando lawyer who is a former director of the Florida division of elections." (At p. A1.)
What does that mean? No perfect election? One candidate has more votes than the other. That candidate wins. So what's not perfect?
Question: Let's start by asking: Does one candidate have more votes than the other?
jeanne's thinking on this question: Well, that's the whole thing they're arguing about, isn't it? Why isn't this a simple question? Couple of reasons:
- Random and Non-Random Error
Machines make errors in counting. So how do we know the "right" number of votes? We make the same assumptions that we do about standard error when we are working with data from very large samples: that one error in one direction will be cancelled out randomly by an error in the other direction. So, to all intents and purposes, the machine count will be correct as long as there is no outside interference by humans, so that the errors may not be random. In other words, if for some reason, a whole lot of votes are tossed out because someone doesn't like the way they were punched, that's not random. And that error could mean the count is not correct within the random error we've assumed.
Now that's the very kind of error we talk about in our discussions of dominant discourse. If the school traditionally opens its financial aid office from 9 to 5 because school is from 9 to 5, that seems pretty normal. But if half the students are coming at night, between 5:30 and 10 p.m., then a financial aid office open from 9 to 5 is operating on the unstated assumption that students who work from 9 to 5 ought to take off from work to handle their financial aid needs. Dominant discourse, accepted practice, dictates that the office be open 9 to 5. But for many students, that decision is structurally violent, in that they are harmed because their school schedule must fit their work schedule. That harm comes about because the school has not adapted the need of the Other, the evening student, into its rules and regulations. Such harm occurs only to evening students, and in this sense, it is not random.
When specific events occur which affect the accuracy of the count, and not in a random way, then we must take those events into account. They introduce non-random error.
Such non-random events are at issue in the Florida electoral vote. One county used a contested butterfly ballot form. That is not random. It affects the votes of that county alone, and across the state affects the vote in a non-random way, since that was the only county to use such ballots. There were reports of racial profiling. To the extent that it can be shown that certain groups were not given access to the ballot, there is non-random error. There are reports of certain votes being discarded at the discretion of a voting official. To the extent that such events can be shown to affect the machine-counted votes, those votes may be in error, and that is non-random error, since it resulted from an outside non-random intervention.
The main difference we must consider is that random error may be considered to cancel out. Non-random error may not. So already, this issue becomes complex. Is the error in counting the popular vote random or non-random? Does it cancel out? Or does it swing the count unfairly in one direction or the other?
- Collapsing or Throwing Out Data
There's another problem we have to worry about in the national presidential elections. The actual election vote is cast by the electoral college. Each state has a number of electors based on many factors that were determined long ago. The Electoral College: Unfair from Day One NY Times.
The raw data, the data we actually collect, consist of our actual votes. Those are what is counted on election eve, and three weeks after, in this case. That's interval data. The votes are fungible. That means that every vote is like every other vote. We each have one vote, and that vote counts like all the rest, even if it's President Clinton voting.
But once the raw votes are counted, we throw out some of the data we have collected. Now, whoever wins this popular vote, by even one vote, gets all the state's electoral votes. So here we are with Bush at 48% and Gore at 48%, but they don't each get half of Florida's electoral votes. Whoever wins, by even one vote, gets all 25 of Florida's electoral votes.
States are given different numbers of electoral votes, depending on all those factors that were constitutionally decided to matter. In statistics, we call that weighting. Maybe everyone in your family gets to vote on the family car you'll get. But someone's vote may count more. That's weighting.
If you consider the weighting of the votes fair, then weighting makes sense. It helps us take those factors on which the weighting is based into account in our voting. Most legal and political science scholars are divided on the issue of weighting in electoral college votes. It is a complex issue that includes concern for the old saw: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
- My Vote Doesn't Count
Many young people, and some older ones who should know better, have concluded that this chaos in Florida means that their votes didn't count. Only Florida counts. That's just not true.
First of all, the popular vote is divided almost equally. This is one of the closest elections we've had. If either of the candidates had won even a small majority, this whole controversy might never have come up. If Bush had won Florida clearly, by popular majority, the electoral college vote would have never been noticed. If Gore had won more of the smaller states, this fiasco would not have occurred. It was the closeness of the popular vote that spotlighted the electoral college. It was a fluke.
Your vote counted in the same way that every Florida vote has been counted, as one of the votes that made up the majority that gave the electoral votes for that state to the one that had the most (by one vote) of the popular vote.
The reason that Florida's vote had been so spotlighted is that there are concerns for non-random errors, like decisions by electoral officials on which ballots to count. If those non-random events had been charged in Idaho, we would be waiting now for the Supreme Court to make decisions on the fairness and accuracy of the Idaho vote.
Maybe, given all this complexity, we could agree that "no election is perfect."