ST. JOHN’S, NL – Tuesday’s vote in the United States may be dominating social media, but it’s just one of 70 national elections taking place this year between now and 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 goes to the polls on November 30 and Ghana on December 7.

“This is the greatest election year in human history,” the United Nations Development Program says on its website. “Half of the world’s population, some 3.7 billion people, will have the opportunity to vote in 72 countries.”

In Canada alone, four provinces have 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 systems – will briefly align with each other.

“It’s something that seems unbelievable, but in reality it’s just this interesting property of oscillators that, from time to time, they all line up,” said the University of British Columbia professor. “It just happens. Which is pretty cool.

Perhaps you’ve seen a video of a pendulum device, in which pendulums of different lengths suspended from a central rod swing at different times and appear to synchronize briefly, creating a coherent wave in unison. As the swing continues, they disperse and fall back out of alignment.

This is an example of aligned oscillators, Tyson said in a recent interview. And that’s pretty much what happened with all these elections scheduled for 2024.

Except for a few early elections or other political upheavals, 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. In Azerbaijan, a vote takes place every seven years.

If we represent each country with a pendulum, the length and period of which corresponds to the country’s electoral cycle, this year – 2024 – is a time when they all swung in unison, just for a moment.

The same thing happens with the planets, Tyson noted. Each takes a different amount of time to complete a complete orbit around the sun. Most of the time, they are completely out of sync with each other. But sometimes some of their trajectories can align, she says.

For example, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Uranus and Mars were roughly aligned near the Moon in March 2023 and were briefly visible in a line that extended from the horizon to about halfway across the night sky.

Tyson acknowledges that it may 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, she said. “But every once in a while, even noisy oscillators align.”

Barring noisy disruptions, it will be another 420 years before all countries with four-, five-, six- and seven-year election cycles scheduled to vote in 2024 will all vote again in the same year, said Pouria Ramazi, assistant professor of mathematics. at Brock University. Indeed, the lowest 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 determine when, for example, Azerbaijan and the United States will hold elections again in the same year – barring any surprises, of course – just take the lowest common multiple of their election cycles: seven and four. In this case, it’s 28.

“This is just a simple example of the beauty of mathematics,” Ramazi said in an interview.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published November 2, 2024.

— With files from The Associated Press