Facts aren’t the most powerful tool in the event of a contested election – By Geoff Colvin (Fortune) / Oct 13 2020
Did you hear about the election worker in Pennsylvania who threw out nine military ballots? The U.S. Justice Department says at least seven of them were marked for Trump. Or how about the mail carrier in West Virginia who admitted to changing the party affiliation of five absentee ballot applications from Democrat to Republican?
Stories like those could be crucial in the aftermath of a contested election outcome. Never mind that the numbers of votes involved are insignificant or that such anecdotes would count for little in the courts or legislatures where a contested outcome would be decided. But these stories could largely determine the critical question of whether the eventual outcome is widely accepted, for the simple reason that stories, researchers have found, are far more powerful than data.
It’s the way we’re hardwired. We don’t naturally see the world as data that we analyze; that’s what Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist and economist, calls System 2 thinking. Collecting and analyzing information—what the legal process does—is slow and difficult, and we have to make ourselves do it. Our default way of thinking is System 1, which “operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control,” he wrote in his classic bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
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