Wednesday, November 3, 2021

Elections are Controversial, Inefficient, and too Often Too Close to Call: Let's Replace them with Coin Flips

In Virginia this week, voters selected a Republican Governor to replace the former Democratic Governor.  The mass media has been flush with excitement leading up to this moment, making prognostications of a potential "wake up call" for Democrats, who appear vulnerable to a reinvigorated resurgence of organized, political, and militant Trumpist fanatics.

If the Democrats could muster any response requiring discipline or backbone or principle, they would be doing so by now.  And even if the Democrats were capable of summoning the enthusiasm garnered by Republicans, they would still be unable to challenge the overwhelming force and organization of Our Conspiracy.

Given that we have relegated the role of Democratic electoral politics to the mere appearance of opposition against a formless malevolence symbolized by the GOP (but which, in actuality and appearance, is controlled by Our Conspiracy), they haven't a hope.

Were I some poor soul dedicated to improving society by voting for Democrats, I would opt for a more rational approach to the problem.

The Virginia election was settled somewhere in the vicinity of 51-48% -- not that much more meaningful than an ideal, theoretical coin flip.  Many US elections are settled this way.  A more rational approach to decided matters of national leadership under such conditions would obviously advocate the employment of actual coin flips to settle such contentious matters -- especially since, on the level of individual voters and the negotiations of their representatives, nobody is convincing anybody of anything these days.

It is rational to use a coin flip to determine our nation's rulers because, at worst, a coin is as inherently unreasonable as a politician or an electorate in a two-party system.  


A single coin flip to determine an entire election would solve a great many problems.  It would be considerably less expensive, more public, and more verifiable (there is, after all, no fake news in sports journalism, where most anybody can see the same action plainly).

Should a single coin flip feel too arbitrary to the American sentimentality about Democracy, the coin flip itself could be democratized.  Voters could vote to choose whether one or three or five coin flips would determine the outcome of a selection.  Voters could choose delegates to choose one of two or three different coins to actually flip, to allay suspicions of a trick coin.  The General Mills and Betty Crocker were able to successfully employ similar models of applied psychology against American housewives in the 1950's.

Coin flips are clearly and rationally advantageous to current US political campaigns in terms of cost, efficiency, contentiousness, accountability, and the potential for democratic input on the particulars of the process.  Furthermore, from a statistical perspective, the outcome is likely to be about the same (that is, given a two-party system and winner-takes-all elections).

To the extent I pity the Democrats who have lost their minds and the Republicans who have lost their souls, I rejoice that, at our current juncture in Conspiracy history, our initial fear of a Trump Presidency has proved immature.






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