Tuesday’s vote in the United States may be dominating social media, but it is just one of more than 70 national elections that will have been held this year by the end of December.
Mauritanians went to the polls in June, the same month Mexico elected its first female president and Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared victory in India. Azerbaijanis and Indonesians voted in February. Iceland will go to the polls on November 30 and Ghana on December 7.
“This is the most important election year in human history,” the United Nations Development Program says on its website. “Half of the world’s population (about 3.7 billion people) will have the opportunity to go to the polls in 72 countries.”
In Canada alone, four provinces held or will hold provincial elections this year: New Brunswick, Saskatchewan, British Columbia and Nova Scotia.
For mathematician Rebecca Tyson, 2024 is a simple but beautiful example of how periodic systems (even messy human ones) will briefly synchronize with each other.
“It’s something that seems amazing, but it’s actually this interesting property of oscillators that, from time to time, they line up,” said the University of British Columbia professor. “It just happens. Which is great.”
Perhaps you’ve seen a video of a pendulum apparatus, where pendulums of different lengths hanging from a central rod swing at different times and somehow appear to briefly synchronize, forming a coherent wave in unison. As the swing continues, they spread out and lose step.
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This is an example of aligned oscillators, Tyson said in a recent interview. And this is more or less what happened with all these elections scheduled for 2024.
Give or take some early elections or other political changes, elections are periodic, like a pendulum, although imperfectly. The United States holds elections every four years. In India, general elections are held every five years. A vote is held in Azerbaijan every seven years.
If we represent each country with a pendulum, whose duration and period correspond to the country’s electoral cycle, this year (2024) is a point where they all swung in unison, just for a moment.
The same goes for planets, Tyson noted. Each takes a different amount of time to complete a full orbit around the sun. Most of the time they are running around completely out of sync with each other. But sometimes, some of their trajectories can coincide, he said.
For example, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Uranus, and Mars were roughly aligned near the Moon in March 2023, and were briefly visible in a line extending from the horizon to about halfway across the night sky.
Tyson acknowledges that it might seem surprising that the orbits and periods of planets and pendulums can be compared to election cycles, which are much more prone to disruption. Elections are “noisy” or imperfect oscillators, he said. “But every once in a while, even the noisiest oscillators line up.”
Barring loud interruptions, it will be another 420 years before all countries with four-, five-, six- and seven-year election cycles expected to vote in 2024 vote again in the same year, said Pouria Ramazi, an assistant professor of mathematics at the University. of Brock. This is because the least common multiple of four, five, six and seven (the smallest number that can be divided by each of the numbers) is 420, he explained.
To find out when, for example, Azerbaijan and the United States will hold elections again in the same year (barring surprises, of course), just take the lowest common multiple of their election cycles: seven and four. In this case it is 28.
“That’s just a simple example of the beauty of mathematics,” Ramazi said in an interview.
— With files from The Associated Press
© 2024 The Canadian Press
