Voting, voters, and entropy

Tucker Carlson
by Gage Skidmore

A popular metaphor for entropy, attributed to Schopenhauer, goes like this: if you take a barrel of sewage and pour in a glass of fine French wine, you have a barrel of sewage. If you take a barrel of fine French wine and (shudder) pour in a glass of sewage, you have a barrel of sewage.

In one of his nightly opinion pieces, Tucker Carlson sarcastically lauded the triumph of voters who cast ballots from the grave. He later had to retract one of his examples after learning one of the ballots he cited had come from a very much alive widow, who had identified herself as Mrs. (husband's name). Carlson's sarcasm had an interesting effect: it produced an emotional reaction sufficient to briefly cloud my analysis, and I had to take a (virtual) step back to analyze what he had to say. Once I broke his arguments down and considered them, I found a couple of interesting layers, ones hinting at American Conservative strategy going forward. 

Ballot drop box
photo by Clifford Snow

On the top layer, Mr. Carlson's argument works out to a straightforward fallacy: his claims imply any name found on both the death rolls and on a ballot must indicate fraud. Leaving aside the case of widows and widowers whose names differ only by the prefix "Mr." or "Mrs.", families name children after their relatives so often we have the common English noun "namesake". Fallacies aside, some minor cheating almost certainly took place in this election. Whether postmortem voting, voting by persons unqualified to vote, or isolated miscounting, any election result in just about any democracy will contain some invalid votes, just as some people who have a right to vote will find themselves unable to. Americans have a fairly long history of accepting a certain amount of cheerful chicanery when it comes to elections: multiple sources quote, as a standard American mnemonic for translating magnetic compass courses to true courses, the phrase "Can dead men vote twice?" for compass course, deviation, magnetic course, variation, true course. The casual appearance of this phrase in popular culture suggests a public perception of democracy as able to accept a certain level of cheating. In reality, of course, the historical vote tampering in the United States, at least the tampering which changed election results and shifted power, consists mostly of the ruthless suppression of African American votes during the period between reconstruction and the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century. Pace Mr. Carlson, the true disgrace to American democracy does not come from Americans who voted from the grave; it comes from Americans who ended up in a grave after they tried to vote.

Probing more deeply, though, we come on another and more interesting layer of the argument, the idea of vote dilution. Mr. Carlson mentions this in passing, in a backhanded acknowledgement of the absence of any evidence, so far, of cheating widespread enough to tip the election. Still, according to Mr. Carlson's aside, cheating in elections does serious harm even if it does not change the result. He claimed each invalid ballot cast cancels out a ballot someone cast lawfully, which requires some questionable assumptions. Even on a statistical basis, if three thousand people cast a lawful ballot for Ivan the Terrible, and two thousand live people and ten dead people cast ballots for Ghengis Khan, does that mean each invalid vote cancels a valid one for the other side? It doesn't change the result. Even looking at the votes as a percentage, the hundred illegal votes only change the percentage of votes Ivan receives by 0.12%, which means, on a proportional basis, the hundred illegal votes for Ghengis only cancel out four of Ivan's voters.

I don't believe Mr. Carlson intends to make that point. I think, rather, he, and probably his target audience, perceive illegal votes as contaminating and spoiling an election, in the same way a glass or even a teaspoon of sewage ruins an entire barrel of fine French wine. Considering an election in this light, as a sacred event in need of purity, contaminated, fouled and polluted by even one invalid vote, reinforces the impulse to secure elections against illegal votes. This, in turn, tends to justify security measures, which as various American courts have determined, tend to disenfranchise the poor and powerless, and in at least one instance, African Americans specifically.

It doesn't really matter why Mr. Carlson approaches elections as a ritual in which purity plays an essential role. His perspective contains a contradiction: to whatever extent permitting illegal votes contaminates elections with unlawful ballots, if security measures prevent qualified electors from casting ballots, these measures freight, or contaminate, the votes of those allowed the franchise with privilege. Unearned privilege surely contaminates an election result as much as vote dilution, and we know privilege has historically played a much greater role in American elections than illegal voting. Ideally. of course, election security measures would both ensure every person with a legitimate right to vote had the chance to cast a ballot, and nobody without the right to vote ever did. It appears at this moment no government has found a way to achieve this result. Absent perfect election security, we must accept the best compromise between exclusion and cheating we can achieve. A regime based on the refusal to tolerate any cheating at all as an unbearable corruption, contamination, and debasement of the electoral process will only corrupt the process in the opposite direction, making the franchise exclusive to the privileged.

If we look at the contaminated wine barrel analogy closely, we see it actually weighs against an extreme desire for purity. A single glass, even a single spoonful of sewage will ruin a barrel of fine French wine, but if you take fine French grapes, crush them, remove all impurities and place them in a barrel, in six years you will have a barrel of grape juice. Winemaking depends on a contaminant; it requires yeast to turn sugars into alcohol, a process we might, in other cases, consider spoilage. For good reasons, the English language uses the same word, sterile to describe an instrument or environment as perfectly free of germs and contaminants, and to describe a person or place as barren. Imperfections, to some extent, define a living process. A living body politic, an ongoing debate and effort to define the best way forward for a city or a nation, always involves imperfections.

It seems clear at least some conservatives in the United States may come out of the recent election determined to channel the conviction their opponents somehow "stole" the presidential election into further attempts to purify the voting, which will, by chance or design, restrict effective access to the ballot box. I suggest that shows a need to both resist the policy and to address, and refute, the thinking behind it.