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

One year ago on Round and Square (12 November 2011)—Lectures: Scholarship (c)
Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "Structure, History, and Culture"

[a] Faces of consternation 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

If you weren't a little disturbed by the vagueness of the counting process yesterday, well, you must be pretty comfortable with uncertainty in your world. You must wear the postmodern condition on your shoulders like a light garment. I don't know, though. I enjoy a little Derrida with my latté just as much as the next nerdy academic. Still, I like to think that it is still possible to enumerate things. We don't have to be (radical) empiricist to think that we should be able to count up all the votes, do we?

Do we?

[b] "Books" RF

Let's give this one more run-through before moving on to the enormity of the larger problem, when we will subject the electoral college to the deep gaze of time present, time past, and time future. 

This example hits close to home—faster than you can say "Carnegie." It is also exceedingly practical. You see, I'm going to send you to your local public library branch to count all of the books. Doesn't that sound easy? Get a note pad. Then just count them: one, two, three, ninety-eight, ninety-nine...256, 257, 1267, 1268...8592, 8593...11426. There are eleven thousand four-hundred and twenty-six books in your local public library. 

You sit back in your chair (your ankles a bit sore from standing), and flash a prideful smile.

11,426. Books. So there.

Better wipe that grin off your face, pardner. The Board of Library Book Counts has a few questions for you. You can count with seeming certainty only as long as your assumptions remain hidden in the background. The questioning begins (you are not yet under oath). Did you count pamphlets? How about DVDs? What was your interpretation of musical CDs, magazines, or even newspapers? Is a magazine a tenth of a book? Is a month of newspapers equivalent to a book? Should they be counted at all? Should they all be counted under separate categories...and just what might those categories be?

[c] Mixed RF

Maybe you still hold to an abiding faith in objectivity. Maybe you think it is just a matter of definition. 

Before you can steady yourself on the high beam of certainty, more questions come rushing in. Is Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason "one book," while Kant in Ninety Minutes is another (together...two books)? Perhaps. Is James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake "a book" in the same sense as A Skeleton Key to Finnegan's Wake is? Maybe. So far, this won't rock the literalist's world. But how do we count journals, such as History and Theory? Is the bound volume each year of the four issues "a book"...or four of them? Or, very possibly, are they another category that needs to be counted differently? These questions can be handled, but the ground has begun to shift a little. There are so many calls for interpretation that it is hard to proceed without an air of wariness.

And what about multiple editions of "the same" book? Even I have that problem in writing my own Curriculum Vitae. Shall we just look at the bound volumes and say "book?" This was actually a fairly difficult task in 1970; imagine what electronics has done to it. The tectonic plates of certainty are grinding beneath our feet.

In the interests of time, I will not belabor the point, but I could (and would enjoy nothing so much as doing so, even to the edges of absurdity). 

[d] Four RF

You must understand the contention here by now, though. The library examples I gave above are not fundamentally different from hanging chads, pregnant chads, or even dimpled chads. There is always narrow (and often quite widely significant) room for interpretation, and, to paraphrase the social theorist Pierre Bourdieu, there are no rules for analysis. There are guidelines, to be sure, but the very terms "hanging, dimpled, and pregnant"—all meant to describe the various ways that "uncareful" voters in Florida punched their computer ballots—tells us all we need to know about never really knowing for sure.

Some voters are incautious morons; some have contingency turn upon them while the ballot slips imperceptibly and they punch "Pat Buchanan" instead of "Albert Gore Jr." And some just fail in the moment of decision. 

There is absolutely no way that we will ever be able to interpret the intent of every single voter who left only a slight sliver of black marker connecting the arrow (on a paper ballot) any more than we can know what was meant by another who blackened the arrow so thickly and thoroughly that s/he seemed to be voting for "all of the above." Just as problematic, if the voter can't punch the needle all of the way through the computer-processed ballot (leaving a dented, hanging, or pregnant chad), poll workers have to decide what a voter "meant" by almost punching through the circle...but not quite finishing the job. Does it mean that s/he wanted that vote, but just didn't exert enough force? Maybe. But perhaps it means that "I am about to vote for Mitt Ramen-y or Bronco Bamma, but I changed my mind at the last moment." I decided to leave my ballot blank (in protest), even though the pressure I initially put on the page has created a late-term pregnant chad.

[e] Arizona New Mexico RF

We can never know.

These are interpretive issues; this is the stuff of the humanites, and not what we mistakenly think of as "objective...science" (only the most gullible believe that the first word is unproblematic). Here is the point. We need to face a troubling reality:

Democracy works pretty well when the margins are beyond one percent. 

If pressed, I would say "0.5%." Beneath that, though, lies disorder, confusion, interpretation, and a little bit of guessing; it is fraught with difficulties both logistical and ethical. Here, I will return to my initial statement. Let's consider it again. You could recount a single state (Georgia, Minnesota, Utah) a dozen times; every result would be different, yet almost all of them would be within a relatively small "margin of error." The actual vote count sounds a whole lot like polling from this perspective. The margins are smaller, but we will never know exactly how many people voted for each candidate. There are too many mistakes, too many stupid voters, and too many errors that even the most careful people had not anticipated.

Margin of error. It's what's for dinner. This is getting complicated, and we are going to take just a bit more time to finish our examination. We don't cut corners on Round and Square.

See you tomorrow.  

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] One... RF