Let's just say that the weights of opening and closing parentheses do not cancel out.

I've had way more issues with proper indentation in Python and YAML than I have with parenthesis in lisp. Meaningful whitespace is about the worst idea I've seen in a programming language.

You would need to show that, including the parens, the average Lisp program requires more tokens than Python.

I'm not sure that's true. Because Lisp has a lot of facilities for writing more concise code that are difficult to achieve without the parens.