Next Election To Be Decided By Wizards

Nearly half of all voters are so dumb they’ll completely change their strongly held political beliefs if you give them a piece of paper with opposite beliefs, researchers have discovered. Even the youngest wizards and witches can perform such simple magic, meaning that all future elections will be decided by our oldest and still most believable religious system: magic.

To get people to reverse their opinions, crafty researchers had the test subjects fill out a survey about an upcoming election. After the dummies finished their forms, the researchers used “sleight of hand” to return a form with the opposite answers selected. “92% of the study participants accepted the manipulated summary score as their own,” the journal Nature reports.

On the basis of the manipulated score, 10% of the subjects switched their voting intentions, from right to left wing or vice versa. Another 19% changed from firm support of their preferred coalition to undecided. A further 18% had been undecided before the survey, indicating that as many as 47% of the electorate were open to changing their minds, in sharp contrast to the 10% of voters identified as undecided in Swedish polls at the time.

Sweden? Yes. Unfortunately, this research was done in Sweden instead of America, where the strongest partisans are often tragically unable to articulate their own beliefs or fill out a simple form.