http://www.unionrecord.com/opinion/display.php?ID=231
Opinion 2000-11-26
Commentary: Any way you figure it, this election doesn’t add up By David Ortman Seattle Union Record
In essence, an election begins as a virtual campaign fought over virtual votes. Any individual elector (voter) exists in a mindwave of political uncertainties and possibilities, often holding multiple contradictory positions at the same time due to a never-ending bombardment of political ads and campaign literature.
At the point of election, these multiple possible states in an elector collapse into a single physical form known as a ballot.
However, the mere process of measuring (counting) these ballots introduces uncertainty (also known as the Heisenberg Election Uncertainty Principle). Paradoxically, the more intently you measure an election, the less certain the outcome becomes.
For example, there was little to no uncertainty about the outcome of the 1972 presidential election between Democrat George McGovern and Republican Richard Nixon because the results were not measured in a way that disturbed the ballots.
However, if each ballot and each polling device in 1972 had been subjected to exact measurement, legal challenges and other scrutiny, it is likely that even this election could have been challenged precinct by precinct and we might still have been waiting a final recount and certification.
One of the lessons elections have taught us is that we don't have to choose between apparently incompatible alternatives.
This also applies to the two objects, Al Gore and George W. Bush, most under scrutiny. They both spin up and spin down and on many issues they appear to spin simultaneously and can go through two different policy holes at the same time.
They can support both the death penalty and the sanctity of life at the same time. They can call both for balancing the budget and increasing defense spending.
It's called superposition of the United States, and the general idea (from Quantum Elections) is that a "political system" (which can be pretty much anything you want) with a choice of "states" (ditto) can be in all the states at once (except for Palm Beach County, Fla.), with different "probability amplitudes" (i.e. position papers) for each state, until the election, at which point it has to drop into one outcome or the other.
This is called (among other things) the "collapse of the political system."
The math can be expressed as follows:
If the political system is denoted as "P" and the number of election attorneys is denoted by "EA" and the number of votes is denoted by "V" and the number "N" of weeks that the legal proceedings stretch on, then the probability that you will find "P" if you force the collapse of the system by an election is inversely proportional to the number of EA plus the number of times the vote is counted "C" to the "N" power.
It looks like this: P = V / (C + EA)^N
Thus, there is a high level of political-system certainty when the total vote (V) is divided by the number of times the vote is counted (C=1) and there are no election attorneys involved (1+0=1). However, as the number of election attorneys begins to approach the number of votes cast, and the number of weeks of legal proceedings increases, P drops rapidly to 1, which signifies Chaos.
Should the number of election attorneys (EA) actually exceed the number of votes cast, the entire political system drops into a black hole sucking everything below the event horizon, including news anchors and pundits.
The lesson for political state functions is that electors are more interesting when you let their full paradoxical superposition evolve undisturbed. Even when they are forced to make up their minds, the closer their ballots are examined, the more uncertainty results.