Reasonable and factual are two different things, which is why we cannot base elections on conjecture. I am sure you have heard of the "trends" fallacy: take any trend, project it into the future, and begin pontificating. Except that trends rarely last, the future remains fairly unpredictable (too many variables). For example, the divorce rate exploded in the 60's, with the advent of more efficient contraception and easier divorce laws, and a general loosening of mores. But eventually it flattened out, and has not changed much in the last 25 years. None of the Club of Rome's predictions about resource exhaustion were borne out, because they were dealing with known reserves and current manufacturing needs. Exploration proved fruitful, and the consumption of some materials diminished as industry evolved.
Similarly, models are useful up to a point, and with severe caveats. For example, it turned out that the computer models that predicted Nuclear Winter were too simple, and that more sophisticated climatological modelling predicted "Nuclear Autumn", a much less radical change in climate, with fewer dire consequences. As the saying goes, the devil is frequently in the details.
Anyway, predicting how the remaining ballots would have been voted from the way the readable ballots had been cast is foolish, since precincts are often markedly different within counties, even supposing that some of the unreadable ballots were meant to be voted. For example, there is a fallacy of composition, where one has the statistics on how a particular group votes, but they are not broken down into meaningful sub- groups. Thus, Jews vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, but Orthodox Jews vote overwhelmingly for Republicans. Hispanics tilt Democratic, except for Cubans, who tilt strongly towards Republicans. To say "this precinct is full of Jews and Hispanics, and thus would have gone to Gore" is wrong, if the Jews are Orthodox and the Hispanics are Cuban. (These are only examples). Thus, without a closer analysis, who knows if the professor has a particularly good point, or is arguing speciously?
In the end, though, we do not determine elections through surmise, but through actual enumeration of the validly cast ballots, which is why Bush is likely to be the next President........ |
