Don’t Know Zone

Uncertainty – there is more of it around than we admit. It gives rise to a very familiar problem which never goes away – many people have fixed views about major social and political issues where uncertainty should be an important consideration. Too often we see a divisive impetus towards one heavily promoted official viewpoint versus sceptics trying to dodge censorship.

We may also see a neutral zone which includes the ‘don’t knows’, but this tends to seem rather an inadequate standpoint when invective rules the debate. Yet there are circumstances where the ‘don’t know zone’ has its attractions. Suppose we take the election of Joe Biden as an example.

The establishment consensus says Biden was elected legitimately. Asserted with diminishing enthusiasm perhaps, but rock-solid legitimacy is the establishment claim. Many Trump supporters and others say he was not elected legitimately, yet to a good approximation, nobody appears to know with any degree of certainty.

If there was extensive fraud and it occurred in a fragmented, low-level manner, then it is possible that nobody knows the extent of it. By its very nature it would be covert and if it was covert, fragmented and low level it could be impossible to quantify with a rational level of confidence. Vote counts could be insurmountably uncertain.

In spite of this, many people will cite sources to demonstrate the correctness of their viewpoint, pour scorn on their opponents and generally insist that Biden was elected legitimately. Others will declare with equal conviction that he was elected fraudulently. It mostly depends on political affiliation.

Yet there is considerable interest to be derived from the don’t know zone. There was electoral fraud, there is always electoral fraud, but nobody appears to know if it made a decisive difference. That there are two convinced camps suggests that nobody knows is not an unreasonable assumption.

The assumption is an example of the middle ground fallacy if we assume that one side or the other has the correct answer. The election cannot be both legitimate and not legitimate. Yet if we don’t know then it is at least worth taking a look at that middle ground as in this case the fallacy may not be resolvable.

If we chose the don’t know zone, then it’s 50/50, the toss of a coin. Heads says Joe Biden was elected legitimately, tails says he was not. This is surely sufficiently appalling for anyone, but apparently not. The democratic world is not sufficiently horrified by the uncertain nature of the Biden election.

There is no need to express the issue more strongly to bring out the underlying problem, which isn’t only the Biden election, but future elections too. We have wandered into a situation where democratic elections are not securely democratic because they are not transparently secure. That’s something we do know.