Elections bring out the worst in people

I hate elections, especially the time right before and right after the actual voting. People get very passionate about politics, and when people get passionate, they tend to abandon clear thinking. The sleep of reason breeds monsters, said Goya, and in case of the height of electoral campaigns those monsters are fallacies. Here is (an incomplete) list of fallacies that "pop up" in the media every time a democracy holds elections.

1) Tribalism. As such it's not a fallacy per se, but it leads to fallacies. People stricken with the tribal mode of thinking tend to believe that their favored candidate is right about everything he says while the other one is wrong about everything. If the candidate they oppose says that two plus three is five, or that it's wrong to eat babies, tribal leaders on the other side automatically disagree or at least try to argue that the other side doesn't really believe what it says.

2) Hypocrisy about tribalism. Tribal disputes always come very crudely disguised as policy debates; but usually anyone with a clear mind can see that those who talk about policies have no interest in finding out what actually works.

2) Ad hominems. Those are ingrained in tribalism, and their most ubiquitous form is assuming that everyone who disagrees with you on policy issues has bad intentions.

3) Belief that "each vote counts." No elections have ever been decided by a single vote, or anything remotely close to a single vote. The probability that your vote will decide which candidate wins national elections is smaller than the probability that you will win the lottery.

4) Religious attitude towards the belief that each vote counts. Those who point out that a single vote does not, in fact, matter, are faced with much sanctimonious indignation. Also, whenever you are arguing that the probability of anyone being a swing voter is essentially zero, some defender of the "each vote counts" doctrine will inevitably counter by saying "What if everyone thought that way?"--as though that reply had any logical relevance.

5) Projection. Part of a whole package of fallacies stemming from people trying to read information from data that simply does not contain it. Polling numbers tell you who people voted for; it tells you nothing about why they voted for this guy and not that guy. It's extremely annoying to hear pundits trying to explain, right after the polls closed, that people voted for Obama mainly because of the economy or because they were tired of the war in Iraq. Before having reliable survey data, it's impossible to tell. Or, another example: how many times have you heard that Obama beat McCain because he ran a much better campaign? A lot, probably. But that's something we can't know, because we have no control: we don't know what Obama's numbers would have been if his campaign was weaker. It could have been the campaign, sure; but it could have been the economic meltdown just as well. We know that, all else equal, the incumbent party does well when the economy is good, and does poorly when the economy is weak. I could have been the case that, in the fall of 2008, the economy was in such terrible shape that McCain would have lost to a fire hydrant. We just don't know.

6) Ecological fallacy. This one is rampant right after the results are turned in as well. Suppose that this time around, Democrats had more young people as well as more Hispanic people voting for them than they did four years ago. You will then inevitably hear someone concluding from this that more young Hispanics voted Democratic. But this conclusion does not follow: without seeing individual data, we don't know if its Hispanics or Whites or Blacks who were younger than usual.

And so on; there's more, much more. It's possible that I will update the list if something else comes to my mind. To wrap the post up, a disclaimer: I only hate elections in an absolute sense, not in a relative sense. That is to say I hate elections, but I hate viable alternatives even more.