It’s worth noting, given my occasional predilection for precise communication, that the language predominant in the news organizations does a disservice to the election. It characterizes, inadvertent as it may be, the votes that make up an election as living, changing, mutating thing.
They’re not.
For example, here’s WaPo:
Even some Trump supporters are battling among themselves about how hard they are fighting for the president to reverse the vote counts in states such as Pennsylvania and Georgia, which flipped to Joe Biden early Friday. Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Tex.) tweeted in agreement with Trump’s claims that “irregularities have been flagrant” in the vote counting but opened the door slightly to a concession, suggesting that Republicans “must accept the final results” if they eventually consider it a fair review process.
The bold is mine, and is the target of my objection. Using this language contributes to the enemies of democracy agenda of discrediting elections, by making the vote seem like a responsive, collective entity that can be influenced, post facto, by the agencies involved in the contest.
This is wrong.
An election is constituted of the votes that are collected by the designated agency by one or more methods, each with possibly its own deadline (compare mailed ballots from overseas military personnel with civilians living in the area conducting the election).
Once collected, they do not legally change, but that is what the generally accepted language of flipping implies, except for the legally part. And any comparison with quantum mechanics’ collapsing probability functions is right out.
A far better comparison from which to draw language is that of a mineral field. Without proper experience and tools, to the eye a craggy field of rocks may be barren of value; to the expert, however, they note tell-tale signs, begin using their tools expertly, start exploring and, eventually, uncover all the valuable minerals.
But those minerals were always there.
As, similarly, the votes were there. Pennsylvania didn’t flip. All that happened is that our exploration of the cast votes became more and more comprehensive, and as the counting transitioned from Trump leaning areas to Biden leaning areas, our knowledge became better and better.
But there were no perturbations to that ‘field of votes.’
National media needs to work out better communications so that they don’t mislead citizens into thinking that voting results are being stolen. It’s simply destructive to the polity to do so. And that’s where this language leads.
