Politics, Elections 2020

The Law of Bad Numbers

Here, in a nutshell, is the Law of Bad Numbers: In an election involving millions of votes, it will always be possible to find reasons to dispute results that you don’t want to accept, and none of them will affect the final tally.

Think about the enormity of the task. In a typical American national election, more than a hundred million people will vote in thousands of different places. Some people will vote on election day. Some will vote early. Some will vote by mail-in ways that require the cooperation of a postal system. Others will fill out provisional ballots because something has made them ineligible to fill out a regular ballot. And all of these votes are supposed to be tabulated in a few hours after the polls close so the networks can project a winner by the time we go to bed on election night.

This is impossible, of course. There is no way to count every single ballot in the time allotted. But it usually doesn’t matter that much because there is plenty of room for error. If a candidate appears to have won a state by three million votes on a first pass, then people aren’t that worried about five hundred provisional ballots here or there that may or may not get counted. They just aren’t that important to the final result.