Proofiness - Charles Seife [48]
In the early evening of November 7, 2000, exit polls indicated that Al Gore had won Florida. All the news networks rushed to make the announcement of Gore’s victory. Of course, the announcement was premature; the vote was far too close to call. Within a few hours, the news media retracted their announcement with much hand-wringing and self-effacement. “If you’re disgusted with us, frankly, I don’t blame you,” intoned CBS news anchor Dan Rather. Chastened and humbled, the news anchors vowed never again to make such an idiotic error; they would be more careful with their exit polls. The resolve lasted just a few hours—until the moment that brand-new exit polls indicated that George W. Bush had won the election. Within moments, Gunga Dan was again coronating the new president. “Sip it, savor it, cup it, photostat it, underline it in red, press it in a book, put it in an album, hang it on the wall,” he declared. “George Bush is the next president of the United States.” Again, it was a false alarm. The race was still far too close to call. Again, the networks sheepishly retracted their mistake—but not before Gore made a phone call conceding the race, which he too had to rescind.
Polls are like a drug. The news media can’t swear off them for even a few hours, no matter what damage they do to their reporters’ reputations. The networks spend enormous amounts of money supporting their habit, even dropping tens of millions for a fix when they’re really jonesing, such as on election night.
Election night is the most dramatic manifestation of the news media’s addiction to polls. Whenever there’s a national election, the networks set up a massive and vastly expensive exit polling system. Yet all that their money and effort buys (at best) is a few hours—the audience gets unofficial word about who won an election at 10 p.m. rather than waiting until 7 a.m. for the official returns. Ask yourself: Would your life be diminished at all if there were no exit polls? Would your life be worse off if there were no polls at all? Unless you’re a marketer or politician, the answer is probably no.
Yet when it comes to polling, all journalistic objectivity and skepticism seem to go out the window. The pull of the poll is so great, the addiction to pseudoevents is so desperate, that the media forsake fact. The news media don’t seem to care if a poll represents any form of truth. It’s proofiness, pure and simple.
Sadly, even truth itself isn’t immune from the ravages of proofiness. Reality can be fuzzy; even events whose outcomes should be clear-cut can be cast into doubt by mathematical malfeasance. Even something as seemingly idiot-proof as tallying the number of objects in a pile is regularly messed up by errors inherent to the process of counting. Worse yet, it is distorted by proofiness whenever those objects being counted are valuable. Like votes.
5
Electile Dysfunction
It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.
—Tom Stoppard, Jumpers
Minnesota’s Senate election officially went off the deep end on December 18, 2008. That was the day that lizard people ate a vote in Beltrami County.
Beltrami County is in the frigid north of the state, up near the Canadian border—not thought to be the best environment for lizard people. However, one voter’s ballot implied that there was a small community of lizard people in Minnesota who saw fit to run for public office. Not just one office, but all of them. The voter had scrawled the same name in the write-in space for each race: “Lizard people.” U.S. president: Lizard people. U.S. representative: Lizard people. Mayor: Lizard people. State representative? Soil and water conservation supervisor for District 3? School board member? Lizard people, lizard people, lizard people. The voter even was