Structure, History, and Culture (6g)—Electoral College Politics

One year ago on Round and Square (11 November 2011)—Lectures: Scholarship (b)
Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "Structure, History, and Culture"

[a] Abstruse RF

This is one post in a multi-part series on the American Electoral College. Click below for the others.

Electoral 1       Electoral 2        Electoral 3        Vote!                 Clearing        Electoral 4        Electoral 5          
Electoral 6       Electoral 7        Electoral 8        Electoral 9        Electoral 10   Electoral 11      Electoral 12
Electoral 13     Electoral 14

We ended yesterday's post with what seemed like a simple idea—one that many people find enormously appealing. Why not call the person with the most votes the winner? Why not let Suzy's twenty-one votes beat Joey's nine...or Al Gore's 50,999,897 beat George W. Bush's 50,456,002? 

You can't spell "growling abstruseness" without "Al Gore."  

Well, never mind about that. Let's continue. We still have some ground to cover here. What's the downside in letting the person with the most votes take office? How hard could that be?

[b] Variegated RF

A whole lot of people have been saying something this for a long, long time. People have mocked the electoral college since the early nineteenth century (and there was more than a little bit of grumbling before that). These days, there are renewed pressures to abandon or reform it. It all seems so very obvious, but be forewarned: there is variegated terrain ahead. Put on your hiking boots. There is brush and scrub on our path, even though you might have heard that the road was newly-paved. 

It wasn't.

So...I have just one more question for you, and dealing with its many hidden corners and assumptions will take us a few more days in this series. Here it is (think about Florida 2000 or Minnesota 2008 as it soaks into your consciousness). Imagine that the election is close—really close. Imagine that we don't know the outcome, and need to get it right. In the closest presidential elections of all time, the closeness centered (given the structures of the electoral college) on a single, almost-tied state (Illinois 1960, Florida 2000, Ohio 2004). As we have seen, some of this was difficult enough to require judicial intervention. It is emotional and numerical at the same time. How can we ever get even one state "right?"

Good question. Now multiply all of that by fifty (give or take a few percentages).

Can you even imagine recounting the entire country?

[c] Fuzzy RF

No, really. I mean every precinct in every county in every state in the whole of that big entity called in some quarters (I am thinking of the Latin Quarter) as Les Éats-Unis. If your answer is something like "of course; no problem—just count' em up!," I suspect that you have never watched an actual recount, even in an election for high school prom royalty. This is exceedingly fuzzy stuff, people, and I have learned something even more disturbing over the decades.

Every recount brings forth further questions (and always differing results). 

I have come to realize that there could be a dozen different recounts, and the final numbers would reflect a dozen different outcomes. This is not meant to imply that they would fail to cohere, and to render a less fuzzy picture of the actual vote than the initial count. Although we almost never do a dozen recounts, my suspicion (I have been thinking about this for many years) is that it would resemble a cluster of polls that we see from Gallup, Zogby, and (these days) PPP, Rasmussen, and NBC-WSJ (not to mention others). In short, it might start to look a lot like Real Clear Politics, but with actual votes and smaller margins of error.

I'll let that soak in for a moment. Take your time. Think it over—voting and polling.

[d] Outcome RF

If, upon reflection, you are not a little disturbed by the idea that the final vote recounts might look a lot like the pre-election polls (each with—if you have watched multiple recounts closely—their own margins of error), well, I don't think much will move you. Maybe you didn't even shudder with terror at Carrie or weep with nostalgia while watching Field of Dreams.

I mean, really... How can counting actual votes lead to different outcomes almost every single time? We can console ourselves that many of the recounts would hold within tightly-constrained differentials of a few votes (or a few tens...or hundreds), but they will almost always vary.

Anyone who follows these matters will know that it can be quite dramatically different from one recount to another, no matter how fervent and apolitical the work of the Secretary of State. I have often wished to see well-distributed political science analyses of multiple recounts, in hopes of exposing the >1% issue for what it is. Over a percentage point (such as 50.6-49.4), we have a firm grasp of near-certainty. But start moving down to half a percent, or a tenth of a percent, and the picture gets increasingly murky. Bring it down to a handful, relatively speaking, and we encounter the troubling reality that we don't really—and never really—will know who won. 

There isn't as much analysis of the multiple recount question "out there" in academia as I would have expected. In other words, there are hints and tattles about the impossibility of solving close-recount questions, but the temporal pressures of popular democracy usually means that a winner must be declared before too much time passes. For the most part, the data is historical and contingent: we have a few large-scale (statewide) recounts we can consider (North Dakota Senate 1974, Illinois Senate 1982, Florida President 2000, Minnesota Senate 2008). But only a few.

I really should move on here, but I have developed a resistance to saying things once or even twice. I apologize if you are truly a "quick study," and not just a little too eager to say "Yeah, I know...keep going." Well, I am sorry to say that my take on the matter is that we should slow down and really overthink this. That's what we do on Round and Square.

So let's do that. Let's think thrice, even though Confucius once (was said to have) said that "twice is quite enough."

[e] Congressional crocus RF

I will begin our overthinking with a television show, but it is not from around these parts (this isn't Gilligan's Island, I assure you). Bear with me while I turn your channels twelve hours ahead to the People's Republic of China. 

There is a disturbing set of scenes in a 2007 Chinese television drama (结婚十年 2: 错爱) about a terribly flawed and truly wicked young stepmother who makes her stepchildren count every grain of rice in a very large bag (further explantion would stretch the bounds of both humanity and credulity). Her order is terribly cruel, but the little girl and boy focus their energies and count them all before dragging the big bag to the hospital where she is a rising medical star. There, weeping with exhaustion, the children collapse upon the bag and tell her that they have counted them all. The woman's co-workers are horrified at the cruelty of the exercise, and the stepmother grows even more venomous in the subsequent episodes. It is a very sorry tale. 

Recounts, even without the wicked stepmother trope, are a little like this.

How are we ever going to count all of the grains of rice in Georgia, Nevada, or even Montana? There are just too many variables, such as little fragments that might be called "grain" and others that seem just a little bit too small. You might interpret grains about thirty percent smaller than normal as "grains" while the rice-counter next to you assumes that anything under ten percent is an anomaly that should be discarded. Then a third person joins the analysis, and a decision is made—it takes two votes out of three...to count one vote. How, even in a medium-sized state such as Georgia, can this level of interpretive difference be controlled? And how can we get enough counters...even in just one state?

How can we know we got it right?

We can't. Don't even kid yourself to think that it is possible to do better than a very solid picture of the vote, but with some variance that can never be ironed out completely. This is a challenging task, even in clear-cut contests. That is why almost every state in the union has a statewide office called "Secretary of State" or "Secretary of the Commonwealth." Her job is to certify election results and to coordinate the electoral process. 55%-45% is much easier than 50.02%-48.98%. This is tough stuff.

We'll make it even tougher tomorrow in the series that (like the American electoral college) will not die.

See you then. 

This is one post in a multi-part series on the American Electoral College. Click below for the others.

Electoral 1       Electoral 2        Electoral 3        Vote!                 Clearing        Electoral 4        Electoral 5          
Electoral 6       Electoral 7        Electoral 8        Electoral 9        Electoral 10   Electoral 11      Electoral 12
Electoral 13     Electoral 14

[f] Red+blue=purple RF