In Isaac Asimov's classic short story Spell My Name with an "S," twodemons compete to see how much they can change the course of history with the most minor of interventions (one of them manages to prevent global annihilation by getting a scientist to change the spelling of his name).
Welcome to the 2024 election: the real world version of science fiction, the butterfly-effect-on-steroids moment in world history. No one should be happy about it.
It's not just that the margin of uncertainty in this election is now greater than the margin of victory, although that is certainly true: presidential polling is historically off by an average of four percentage points, and every single swing state except Arizona is now within a single point (and even that is murky, since the majority of pollsters are intentionally Trump-shifting their numbers to avoid a repeat of their 2016 and 2020 undercounts for the former president).
But the future has always been uncertain. Now, in 2024, the future is actually random.
What if the utility DTE experiences a power outage affecting Wayne County, Michigan at 4:50 PM on Election Day? This is hardly far-fetched. Michigan has one of the least reliable power grids in the country. Sudden thunderstorms caused 300,000 DTE customers to lose power a month ago. And Russian hackers—who for years have maintained widespread access to utility control rooms and who have intervened on Trump's behalf before—took down a Texas utility in January.
Wayne County is the most populous in Michigan and historically casts about two-thirds of its presidential vote for Democrats. One ill-timed outage in Democrats' biggest source of Michigan votes would leave poll workers unable to access electronic lists of registered voters and likely swamp the supply of provisional ballots. Many voters would be functionally unable to vote, or would give up in the face of interminable lines, in a state that was decided by a hair in 2016.
Or what about this one? Republicans in Georgia have been mucking around with state election rules ever since Trump lost by a mere 11,000 votes in 2020. The big change is a rigid set of mail voting restrictions that could result in 30,000-40,000 previous voters having their votes rejected or being unable to vote outright. But there were also a set of much more recent proposals—including a hand counting process for ballots, an "inquiry" process designed to let dodgy operators go on fishing expeditions, and new photo ID rules for absentee votes— which a judge had to throw out yesterday as "illegal, unconstitutional and void."
What is likely to happen is that tens of thousands of absentee votes will now be rejected—some in error—and thousands of voters whose mail ballot applications were rejected will show up at the wrong places and have to vote provisionally. And what if some election officials allow the Republican-proposed procedures to happen that a judge just deemed unconstitutional, and it introduces more confusion? What will Georgia courts allow and disallow among that mess, and how many votes will ultimately evaporate?
Or...what if it rains?
Not thunderstorms. Not hail, locusts, or other biblical plagues. Just rain. Studies show that all it takes is a centimeter to depress Election Day turnout by a percentage point. So, what if it starts raining at 7:00 AM in central North Carolina across the eight counties from Alexander in the east to Randolph in the west? In 2020, Trump won those counties by 208,930 votes. Assuming similar results in 2024, a turnout decrease of 1% would cost Trump over 2000 votes, about 3% of his 2020 winning margin, in a race balanced on a razor's edge (this is likely a big underestimate of decreased Republican turnout, since Republicans usually rely more on Election Day voting, and Trump relies much more on people who aren't highly attached to voting).
What should one conclude from this small sample of the array of arbitrary events that could drive history? Two things.
First, we should all hate this. An electoral system where the fate of our nation could boil down not to the will of the majority will but to the vagaries of chance—or the intervention of demons—is clearly broken. Elections should not hinge on electricity. Or rules-gaming. Or Rain. They should hinge on getting an accurate reflection of the will of the people.
There's another Asimov story that imagines elections being decided by a computer analyzing a single voter. Everyone else's opinions are inferred, but they don't get an actual say. The Electoral College has gotten us far closer to that dystopian insanity than any of us should accept: in 2020, if just 22,000 voters in three states had changed their mind out of the 158 million who voted, Trump would have won.
The hegemony of the few who decide for the rest is intolerable. And we can fix it. There is a practical plan underway among the states called the National Popular Vote Compact that would rigorously follow the Constitution. It would leave the states in charge of elections but determine the president through a national popular vote. Only seven more states need to agree (and it's already passed in one chamber in those states, including Republican-led ones).
This would end the reign of randomness. Whatever the outcome this year, state legislatures should make it their first order of business next year.
And second, this situation should be a wake-up call to both major parties. The status quo approach in which the parties focus on mobilizing starkly different groups of Americans to try to edge out the other side in a few races to grasp a temporary and tenuous hold on power has led us to a destructive stasis. Both parties need to broaden their appeal. Republicans: wake up from your Trump stupor and become a tolerant, vibrant party based on classically conservative principles. Democrats: accept that for all your virtues, much of America feels like you aren't hearing them, and rediscover your moderate mojo.
Maybe, just maybe, this is the one thing Americans can all agree on: our fate shouldn't rest on a butterfly's wings.
Matt Robison is a writer, podcast host, and former congressional staffer.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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