In a general election there are N parties. Each voter has a reference for party X to be perceived as the governing party. That’s a variable controlled by the action of voting. Many voters cast a vote for party X, the entire collective controlling their perception of the same environmental variable. The collective controlling for seeing party X to be in government is just one example of collective controllers in the election, while other groups collectively control for perceiving party Y, Z, W, etc. to be in government. The collective controllers controlling for government to include their preferred party (usually) are in conflict, the N-1-dimensional virtual controlled perceptual variable being the mix of parties included in government.
Just as in Kent’s original conflicted control demo, the pulls by the N Giant Virtual Controllers result in a party mix that is not the reference mix for any of the individual GVCs. It is only changed by another election (unless members of one party collective move to join a different one — in the Anglo-Canadian Parliamentary, this is called “crossing the floor” — and cause the governing coalition to lose its majority).
Elections are a form of stochastic collective control, whereas membership in a party collective is pseudo-continuous, as I described in the preceding thread Varieties of neural activity - #5 by MartinT.