I have blogged before about our problem dealing with "analog" situations and elections are no different. That is the point of this blog.
Who won the last USA Presidential election? Is it Trump or Biden? The country wants an "exact" answer, but is that possible? As I have pointed out in the past, we are programed to expect exact answers when the world we live in is analog. If we had zero illegal votes and we had exact counting of those votes, it might be possible to have an exact answer about who actually won. We all should know that it is impossible to be exact on all the factors related to the election. That is why the process is actually analog.
If you ask someone who won the Presidential election, they will give you an exact answer. Does that mean that this or that person really won the election? Why do you think that different people looking at the same data would make different exact decisions? What they are doing is playing the odds. Does that mean that an election is just like gambling.? In a way it is, but it should not be.
In this past Presidential elections there were more irregularities than elections in the past. I think that we can all agree on that point, but how did it change the odds on who actually got the most votes? Here is an example. What if in the past the odds were 99% to 1% that the tally of the votes resulted in the person who actually got the most votes? Given those odds most people looking at the data were satisfied with the results. What if the odds changed to 95% to 5% that the tally revealed who actually won the majority? Would those honest people looking at the data come to the same conclusion? I am not sure.
Not only are all elections analog, those who reject or accept the results are also analog. That means if we want to have the least number of problems with voters accepting or rejecting the results, we need to minimize the illegal votes knowing that they can never be driven down too zero. In the past, I used the example of bank robbers and pointed out that no matter how many police or vaults banks have they can never drive the number of robberies down to zero. It is the same with election, but the fact that it can not be driven down to zero, we still need to drive it down to the point that "most" voters have confidence in the results. Notice I used "most" above, but we should agree on a reasonable number. What do you think that percentage should be? If it was 99%, that means, if we have 150 million voters, that means we would accept the fact that 1.75 million voters would still feel they were screwed.
Are you starting to see that we need a debate and an investigation to reduce irregularities to the point that some maximum number of voters have confidence in the election? You know we can't get it to zero, but we can't ignore the problem either, if we want a unified democracy.
