Why We Vote Ep. 132: Quantum Elections, Parallel Motion, and The Arapaho Twist

In this mind-bending episode, Ashe in America welcomes Draza Smith for an unprecedented deep dive into the mechanics of election systems and the hidden patterns behind vote counts. They kick off with headlines about Ken Paxton’s investigations and divorce scandal, lawsuits over New York’s 2024 election, and Wisconsin’s missing ballots, before diving into Draza’s groundbreaking research. Draza explains her discovery that vote totals in numerous counties consistently return to predictable set points, behaving less like random human choices and more like engineered outcomes governed by probabilistic models. She details how cast vote records, when sorted in different ways (what she calls the “Arapaho Twist”), reveal mathematically improbable patterns, like “partisan parallel motion”, across races, states, and vendors.

The discussion escalates into her theory that the deterministic decay curves used in quantum mechanics can model elections with uncanny accuracy, suggesting outcomes are pre-calculated to reach a ratio no matter how many ballots are processed. With charts, analogies, and lively back-and-forth about election integrity, transparency, and why “glitches” are never just glitches, this episode challenges everything you think you know about vote counting, and offers a radical framework for understanding how it might really work.