Though it may seem like the thread of events have nothing in common, they actually do, and their occurrence reveals potential hazards with our current democratic model of politics. Last week, a friend asked if I wanted to participate in a cupcake competition for Halloween and I naturally agreed.
Those that have cooked with me would know that I’m a pragmatist when it comes to food; I can make delicious Vietnamese-style lemongrass pork, but don’t expect me to arrange it for Instagram likes. Even the friend that asked me said that it was just for fun and I’m probably not going to win. So, I set out to test his hypothesis.
Ready-made cupcakes came in several different shapes and sizes with a variety of icing, condiments, and biscuits available for decoration. The only rules were that the finished product had to fit inside a standard cupcake box and the cupcake had to be whole at the time of the submission (so no taking bites out of it).
I proceeded to create the worst cupcake ever: I chose a cupcake that had not risen properly and so they were flat on the top and flat on the bottom. Then, I proceeded to squeeze an obscene amount of icing on the top and placed an Oreo to top it off. When I realized that I had not reached the maximum permissible height, I took another flat cupcake, repeated what I just did and decked it on top of the first cupcake upside down.
The monstrous creation was nothing more than a single Oreo cookie sandwiched between a half-inch of purple icing sandwiched between two cupcakes. Needless to say, it was ugly. The top of the cupcake was just a bare bottom of another cupcake and there was really no decoration on it whatsoever. I entered the cupcake into the competition just like that.
Much like what you would expect, most of the other contestants understood the joke and couldn’t believe that a double-decker cupcake sandwich had just been entered among the intricately designed competition. Some people made a graveyard on theirs, others drew ghosts, pumpkins, and witches to an uncanny degree of accuracy. Mine was just big and ugly; imagine if an architect plopped a monolithic glass walled building in Paris, that’s what it was. Oh wait…The Tour Montparnasse…
When it came time to vote for the winner, each contestant was given a ring to vote with and had to put it in front of a cupcake that was not your own. As the rings were placed it became clear that my monstrosity was going to have a fighting chance. Moments later, the winner was announced and mine came second.
I’m almost completely sure that my cake was objectively the worst one in the entire competition, yet its victory came from the popular vote, how could this be? It seems that it was such an unlikely contender that voters wanted it to win simply ‘for the lols’, to see if the judges would recognize it with a podium finish. There was no other reason to vote for it other than to have a laugh at something that wouldn’t normally happen.
Following this incident, I searched up news articles on Boaty McBoatface and Brexit, two recently contentious issues regarding the popular vote. There are plenty of articles commenting on the issue concluding that an ill-informed and irrational electorate are bound to make bad choices. James Surowiecki, author of ‘The Wisdom of the Crowds’ summed it up better than any other article I seen out there, a wise electorate has:
- Individuals should have unique opinions on the same issue;
- Views of these individuals should not succumb to popular opinion;
- Individuals are able to draw from their unique knowledge and area of expertise; and
- A mechanism exists to turn individual opinions into collective decisions.
A society cannot function properly if important decisions are decided by a citizenry that do not have the aforementioned traits. After all, that’s why we elect politicians to do the job for us. Surely, elected officials are more adept at making complicated decisions than a frustrated keyboard warrior like me?
