The Zzyzx Voting Guide

I know the election day cliche, "If you don't vote, you lose your right to complain." Personally I think the opposite is true. By voting, you are agreeing to go along with the will of the majority. Complaining afterwards seems like the action of a sore loser. Personally, I respect the concept of non-voting or of voting for a person who has no chance of winning as a political action. For me, "None of the Above," is always a valid choice to make, and as November 7th loomed, it was one I'd been considering.

The problem with voting for President is that it involves such an act of hubris. Trying to get a grasp on a concept as complex as the national economy is extremely difficult, if not impossible. Too many extremely intelligent people have devoted their entire lives to studying this to make me think that somehow I'd come up with the magic answers. At some point you're forced to assume to generalize from your own circumstances, and if 31 years of living has taught me one thing, it's that the vast majority of people are not like me at all.

This is but one example of a deeper problem. As any good mathematician knows, any logical belief system has to be built out of a system of axioms. Think of it as the parent being asked "Why?" over and over and over again. At some point, they have to say, "Because I said so." You can only trace back any logical argument so far until you're forced to deal with an alogical [1] argument. Axioms cannot be proven or disproven within the system. The most you can do is show that a given set of axioms contain logical contradicitions. However, in order for this to be valid, you have to go into the argument without your own baggage. You can't look at an opponent's set of beliefs and find the contradiction, if the contradiction is that they no longer conform to your own definitions and ideas. The classic example here is the attempts to remove Euclid's 5th Postulate[2] from geometry.

So if you can't vote out of logical conviction, at least you can try to vote out of emotional conviction. Well maybe you can, but after spending years of studying graduate level mathematics, I've spent a lot of energy into challenging beliefs. Few of my own have managed to survive that. As I leave the world of mathematical training some beliefs are starting to cling to me. The problem is that while I might favor decrimializing marijuana or federal subsidies for me to go on tour, few canidates would agree with me on such issues.

The week before the election was spent in confusion. As I canvassed the ballot, I saw a canidate that - while not as stupid or scary as people tried to make him out to be - provided me with no positive reason for voting for him. Giving up on Bush, I then saw a person who felt little concern to separate himself from extremely questionable actions of his boss, and when he did, did so for the wrong reasons; I don't want an old school moralist, I want someone who understands that women workers are to be treated as equal workers, not as sex toys for the boss. As for Nader, well the more I heard about him, the less I liked. Anyone who tries to win by defeating his close allies and then hope that things get so bad that people vote for him, as an article in Slate claims, doesn't understand how a winner take all system works. Throw that in with his complete lack of foreign policy understanding, and the Presidental role is clearly not the one for him. Maybe he'd make a good representitive, but that's not what he was running for.

So Bush was out, Gore was out, Nader was out. I had to vote because some local inititives concerned me. What to do? My choice was clear. As I walked into the polling place, I flipped a coin. The coin landed on tails. Kitty Finn would be my presidental choice, with Holly Finn being my call for vice president. Hey, the Finn/Finn ticket promised a monorail from Seattle to Hawaii and 6 weeks summer vacation. I don't see any other people offering that.

After I voted I went downtown to see WSP. We gathered for some preshow fun at a bar across the street from the Paramount. I was asked about my vote, and as I explained, "Look, if Bush takes the election, AND Washington goes for Bush AND if Gore had won Washington it would have made a difference AND Bush won Washington by under 1000 votes, then I would feel guilty about my vote." Everyone laughed about the possibility of that happening. It's a good thing that I don't live in Florida.

As I finish this column on the 12th, the election is still in doubt. There's a reason for that. It's not just that the winner in Florida is unknown; the winner in Florida is unknowable - call it the Heisenberg Uncertainty Election. While the difference in the popular vote currently is amazingly slim (212,291 votes out of 98,303,931 votes cast - .2% of the vote), that seems extreme compared to the difference in Florida. In Florida, as of this writing (8 AM PST on the 12th), the difference is 288 votes out of 5,820,102 votes - a margin of under .005%. In order for it to be possible to even have an accurate count, fewer than one out of every 20,000 voters would have had to have some problem (accidentally getting 2 ballots, accidentally going to the wrong precinct, accidentally voting for the wrong person, feeling intimidated by a cop being there, not punching out the ballot all the way) for there to be an accurate count. I can't see that being possible. Election day is a chaotic affair. An error rate of one out of one thousand, or one out of two thousand votes would be amazing. On some level, the vote count is a fraud; the exact number of people who preferred one canidate to another is impossible to know. When the election is this close, getting the winner right is a fluke; the vote is a tie.

About a month ago, I was with most of my friends about the two party system. Any system that seems designed to create boring debates between the center-center-left and the center-center-right, needs to be changed somehow. I now take that back. There are two kinds of ties - let's call the types "Bush-Gore" and "Buchanan-Nader." The first kind is the one that we have now. Both men are so centrist that few people care that much which one wins. The second kind of tie would be where both people are so extreme that the nation would be divided between the camps. Sure, there's the occasional person or web site calling for armed revolution over this vote (see Time Bomb 2000 for the "Gore is stealing the election" point of view), but in the other case there would be rioting in the streets already. We just get lawyers making transparently partisan arguments; is anyone taking either side seriously that their debates over the hand count are based on some moral principle?[3]

Our system has a weird goal. It's not designed for the canidate that most people like to win. Instead, it's arranged so that the person that the fewest people dislike win. The more I think about that, the less I mind it. No one gets what they really want, but at least no one really minds too much who wins. It seems that there are much worse ways of running elections.

[1] As opposed to "illogical."

[2] While Euclid's first 4 postulates were things that were really clear ("You can draw a straight line between any two points", "All right angles are equal to each other"), the infamous 5th postulate was a mess, "That, if a straight line falling on two straight lines make the interior angles on the same side less than two right angles, if produced infinitely, meet on that side on which are the angles less than the two right angles." For centuries, mathematicians tried to eliminate this ugly axiom by proving it as a consequence of the other axioms. Later people tried assuming the opposite and tried to find a contradiction. After some work, they thought that they discovered it. "Lines" in this system didn't look like lines as they understood them. "Look," they cried, "a contradiction." It wasn't until later that it was understood that the contradiction was not in the system itself, but rather was in the mathematican's belief system. "It doesn't look right to me," is not the same as "this is logically inconsistent." There's a great webpage on this issue at:
http://sunset.backbone.olemiss.edu/~rpagejr/euclid.html

[3] Mathematics can be described as the art of abstraction. Proofs can't be done by showing an example; all reasoning is done about the general case that the example demonstrates.

Politics, on the other hand, is all about the particulars of a situation. This used to drive me crazy at Bard. Someone would make some sort of political argument, and I'd try to abstract the principles they were using to ask them if the beliefs they were holding would remain true in a different set of circumstances. (e.g. "You say a woman should have the right to control her body. Why then shouldn't drugs be legalized?") This line of political debate makes a lot of sense to me, but apparently it drives people up the wall. This must be why there are so few famous mathematician/politicians.