Noncitizen voting, already illegal in federal elections, becomes a centerpiece of 2024 GOP messaging
AP's May 18, 2024 overview of noncitizen-voting rhetoric documented how a politically useful intuition about election fraud kept being treated as if it were established by the evidence. The report is especially useful for seeing how tiny counts, suggestive language, and moral urgency can be stretched into system-wide claims. The fallacy here is Base rate fallacy: someone judges how likely a case is by focusing on vivid case-specific evidence while ignoring the underlying frequency of the thing in question. That matters here because for rare conditions or rare events, even very accurate tests can generate more false positives than true positives. A better analysis would remember that the missing question is not just 'How accurate is the test?' but 'How common is the condition before the test is applied?'
Associated Press · 2024-05-18
Fact-check: Trump keeps claiming noncitizen voting is a big problem. It's not
NPR's October 12, 2024 fact check on noncitizen-voting claims is a good case study in the gap between isolated anecdotes and population-level conclusions. It shows how a few suspicious stories can feel decisive even when the base rates and verified counts point the other way. The fallacy here is Base rate fallacy: someone judges how likely a case is by focusing on vivid case-specific evidence while ignoring the underlying frequency of the thing in question. That matters here because for rare conditions or rare events, even very accurate tests can generate more false positives than true positives. A better analysis would remember that the missing question is not just 'How accurate is the test?' but 'How common is the condition before the test is applied?'
NPR · 2024-10-12
Iowa finds several dozen instances of noncitizens voting in a past election
AP's coverage of Iowa finding dozens of noncitizen votes is useful precisely because it reports real violations without letting the count float free of scale. The story helps show the difference between acknowledging a genuine problem and inflating it into a sweeping narrative. The fallacy here is Base rate fallacy: someone judges how likely a case is by focusing on vivid case-specific evidence while ignoring the underlying frequency of the thing in question. That matters here because for rare conditions or rare events, even very accurate tests can generate more false positives than true positives. A better analysis would remember that the missing question is not just 'How accurate is the test?' but 'How common is the condition before the test is applied?'
Associated Press · 2024-10-23
Q&A on H5N1 Bird Flu
FactCheck.org's May 2024 H5N1 explainer is a strong illustration of why people need mechanisms, prevalence, and scope before drawing practical conclusions from a scary headline. It helps distinguish real uncertainty from reasoning that jumps too fast from fragments of evidence to a preferred story. The fallacy here is Base rate fallacy: someone judges how likely a case is by focusing on vivid case-specific evidence while ignoring the underlying frequency of the thing in question. That matters here because for rare conditions or rare events, even very accurate tests can generate more false positives than true positives. A better analysis would remember that the missing question is not just 'How accurate is the test?' but 'How common is the condition before the test is applied?'
FactCheck.org · 2024-05-04
Why AP called the Arizona Senate race for Ruben Gallego
AP's explanation of why it called the Arizona Senate race for Ruben Gallego is a useful numbers-first counterexample to intuition-driven political certainty. It shows what it looks like to reason from remaining vote shares, path constraints, and actual denominators instead of headline impressions. The fallacy here is Base rate fallacy: someone judges how likely a case is by focusing on vivid case-specific evidence while ignoring the underlying frequency of the thing in question. That matters here because for rare conditions or rare events, even very accurate tests can generate more false positives than true positives. A better analysis would remember that the missing question is not just 'How accurate is the test?' but 'How common is the condition before the test is applied?'
Associated Press · 2024-11-12
