2000 US election

Everyone remembers the 2000 presedential elections. The Florida confusion, the hanging chads, blurry eyes deciding if the vote was in or out, and the final result where a candidate who won the popular vote ended up losing the election.

The situation was ideal for media - the high stake, clash of ideologies, a very close race, and a controversy to end it all. The much touted y2k had fizzled out without any problems, disappointing the media moguls, but the presedential race delivered. The result was touted as indicative of a "polarized population" and a "failure of the system", because if every vote counted, how come the someone win more votes, and yet lose?

Polarization is a word that media loves. It brings out images of two hard lined grouped in an evenly matched tug of war. A wonderful contest, exciting fight, blow for blow and all the sport related verbiage which often gets used for describing elections.

Yet, how valid is the conclusion? Just because something split 50-50, does not mean there is polarization. In fact completely disinterested population who did not care who won will give exactly the same result. A blind toss of coin will give you those odds. Where does polarization come from? Sure there were some hard core Bush supporters and some who swore by Gore. There always are for all presedential elections. But the fact remains that an election is a social experiment. And just like any other experiment, it has its limitations. One of them is that it is simply counting votes, and not the severity of the voters feelings. So just because the numbers were evenly matched does not tell us anything about how much the voters care.

The other limitation is that of the minimum error margin. Every experiment has it. Scientists try to minimize theirs, but are never able to eliminate it. In social experiment like an election, the margin is fairly large - of the order of 1 to 2 percent maybe. It involves (in decreasing order of importance) who exactly is able to turn up on the election day, how many votes are invalid, how many votes are counted correctly. If a scientist found this result with the error margins involved, she would be forced to conclude that the two candidates are equal within the error margins. If the election commission announced something like this, there would be a huge uproar. It will be unacceptable. We want to think that every citizen's view counts, and hence every vote should be counted. That the citizens don't make the effort for voting to be close to 100% doesn't matter - it's a matter of principles. When someone talks about matters of principles, you should smell a black and white thinker. This is a classic example. For a population of 250 million, if two candidates differ by a few hundred votes, it does not really mean he is preferred. It means he won on that day. Those difference votes can be interpretted as convenient tiebreakers - nothing more.

To me the results simply said that the overall American population did not care whether Bush was elected or Gore got the job. But these kind of statements will not sell newspapers.