Uncertainty Principle

By Crispin Sartwell

Back in 1972, the Youth International Party (aka Yippies) nominated Nobody for president. When more people failed to vote than voted for either George McGovern or Richard Nixon, the Yippies declared that Nobody had won, so that the office of president was vacant.

Ah, idealism. Unfortunately, according to the Constitution, the candidate with the most electoral college votes wins, even if no one votes in the popular election. Instead of a happy anarchy under the benevolent gaze of Chairman Abbie Hoffman we endured (as perhaps you will recall) the dimestore satans of Nixon's inner circle.

But in 2000, Nobody really did win. The Miami Herald, after recounting 64,248 Florida undervotes under the system advocated by Al Gore (counting every dimpled or pricked ballot) tripled Bush's margin to 1,665. "The decision made by the American people now is numerically confirmed," said former Montana governor Mark Racicot, speaking for the Republicans.

On the other hand, if only clean punches were accepted, Gore would have won by three votes. Bob Poe, chairman of the Florida Democratic Party, maintained that "My feeling is still that more people went to the polls to vote for Al Gore than went to vote for George W. Bush."

Meanwhile, the Herald, Knight-Ridder, several Florida newspapers, and the USA Today are in the process of recounting 110,000 overvotes - which machines indicated had more than one candidate punched - and a University of Chicago group is recounting the state as a whole.

Each of these counts may lead to squabbling, but the squabbling will be dull because (a) Bush occupies the White House, and (b) none of the counts can be a decisive demonstration that one candidate got more votes than the other.

There is no codified agreement about constitutes a valid ballot, and there is no way to go back and reconstruct the intentions of each voter, whatever Poe's "feeling" may be. So we have to live with the uncertainty, which I guess turns out not to be as hard as we thought. Plus it seemed like Bush was pleased to win, and Gore was relieved to lose.

The odd idea that Poe wants the election decided on his intuition about what hundreds of thousands of people intended is matched in absurdity by the Republicans' repeated declaration, based on a few hundred ambiguous ballots that "the people have spoken."

In fact, of the several myths of democracy punctured like clean ballots in the 2000 election, the idea that "the people" have a voice, or a will, is the first casualty. Individual people have wills and voices - though even these can be ambivalent and ambiguous. "The people" have the will and the voice of all these people at once: in other words, an incomprehensible cacaphony.

Occasionally you can get an order out of this cacaphony, but then you need to lead or inspire actual individual people, and neither George W. Bush nor Al Gore is capable of doing that.

For that reason among others, it is not all that important who is president. The more significant lesson of the Florida counts is that even in the land of gleaming skyscrapers, pristine lawns, and machine counts, we have to live with irremediable uncertainty.

We can't know: who won the election, whether we'll live to see tomorrow, whether God exists or loves us, whether our kids will turn out okay, whether human cloning is a good idea, whether we're dreaming right now, whether there are any scientific principles that are more than mere approximations, whether we need a twelve-step program, whether Rothko was a better painter than Delacroix, whether the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is true, whether we can ever be certain of anything.

Compared to all that, the uncertainty in Florida is trivial.