Multiple-choice question: How crazy is this?

A) Doggone crazy

B) Oh, it’s plenty crazy, believe you me

C) Crazy-as-all-get-out

D) Crazier’n a $3 bill

E) All of the above

Answer: E &045; All of the above.

This quiz has been brought to you by the Committee To Figure Out What The Heck Is Up With That State Senate Election.

Sure, going in, it was a smart bet that the thing was going to be close. But this close? You’ve got to be kidding me.

The craziest part of all is those happenings in Mower County, which was the scene of some of the looniest election shenanigans this side of Florida. Come to think of it, the name Mower County is suspiciously similar to that of Broward County in Florida, where Recount Madness made an appearance two years ago. Throw in a few hanging chads and a couple really bad baseball teams, and we’d have a slice of Florida right here in Minnesota.

Over in that county to the east, we had 17 ballots that up and walked off, another stack nobody bothered to count on Election Day, and dozens that were counted as under votes on Nov.

5 but wound up in Dan Sparks’ or Grace Schwab’s column during the recount. So much for precision vote-counting machines. Lucky the Secretary of State’s office was on hand in Austin to help with this recount, or the ballots may have been accidentally set on fire or something.

So, now that we’ve counted and recounted the ballots, it’s still not clear who the voters of this district want representing them in the state senate.

This is an extreme example of what has happened in this state and across the country this year and, really, the last few years. There’s isn’t much consensus out there about who should be making the decisions in our government.

Think about it. Locally this year, Sparks and Schwab each had about 45 percent of the votes cast. Of all the registered voters in the district, approximately 80 percent showed up to vote on Election Day, so it’s more like 36 percent of the registered voters in the district picked Schwab, and 36 percent picked Sparks. That’s a little more than one in three.

Then there’s the fact that not all voting-age people are registered voters. Take away the people who aren’t even registered, and the percentage of the population who supports Sparks or Schwab dwindles down to less than a third, maybe even down to a quarter.

And this is in an area of the state that has one of the highest voter turnout rates. And that’s in a state that consistently has the highest turnout in the nation. Imagine how bad it is in other states where involvement is sorely lacking; when it’s said and done, you’ve probably got 15 or 20 percent of the voting-age population supporting the leaders who are put in power.

That’s why it’s so annoying to see leaders or followers of the two major parties walking around like they’ve got some kind of mandate from the public. This year, when Republicans were generally successful across the board in this state and the nation, you still had huge portions of the population who didn’t support those candidates. Many GOP Senate and gubernatorial winners barely edged out their opponents. Minnesota’s winner in the governor’s race, for the second straight election, did not get half the popular vote. Our president didn’t even get more of the popular vote than his opponent. The Republicans have an edge in the U.S. Senate, but barely. The country is not exactly unified behind these people.

The same can be said for the Democrats, when they were seeing better days. Bill Clinton never got as much as half the popular vote. When the Democrats controlled Congress in the 1980s, the public put a check on them by electing Reagan and the first Bush. When they had the presidency with Clinton, the people put Republicans in control of Congress.

That’s not consensus.

So when these newly elected politicians start strutting around like they’re the cock of the walk, don’t be fooled. They don’t have a mandate. Probably the best thing for a country that can’t decide what it wants is for the government to be divided enough that neither side gets all, or even most, of what it wants.

Dylan Belden is the Tribune’s managing editor. His column appears Sundays.