How can you prepare for the US Presidential election resulting in a disaster?

That question may sound unreal to you. Yet it doesn’t sound so far-fetchedto many political leaders and experts observing the run-upto the election. With many moremail-in ballots, which are much more vulnerable to legal challenges, the counting might drag on for many weeks. It may wellbe accompanied by widespread civil disturbances, serious economic turmoil, and potentially a constitutional crisis.  

Is a voice deep inside your gut whispering that you shouldn’t worry about it: an election disaster never happened before, and so it won’t happen now? Maybe it’s the same voice you heard when reading articlesat the beginning of this year about the need to preparefor the possibility of COVID-19 turning into a pandemic?

Our brains have a disastrous tendency to underestimate greatly low-probability and high-impact disruptors, what you might have heard called “black swans.”

This disastrous tendency comes from dangerous judgment errors that researchers in cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics call cognitive biases. These mental blindspots impact all areas of our life, from health to politics and evenshopping.

Three cognitive biases bear the biggest fault for our failure to face the truthabout the possibility of an election disaster.

The normalcy bias refers to our brains assuming things will keep going as they have been – normally – and evaluate the near-term future based on our short-term past experience. As a result, we underestimate drastically both the likelihood and impact of a serious disruption, such as a constitutional crisis.

Another major problem, the confirmation bias,describes our strong preference to look only for information that already supports our pre-existing beliefs and gut feelings, and ignore date that doesn’t. That includes the possibility of a major election disaster.

When we make plans, we naturally believe that the future will go according to plan. That wrong-headed mental blindspot, the planning fallacy, results in us not preparing sufficiently for contingencies and problems. The planning fallacy applies especially black swan-type low-probability, high-impact events such as a US election catastrophe.

To address these cognitive biases, you need to use probabilistic thinking. First, assign a probability to various election disaster scenarios.

What’s the probability that the mail-in ballots will take a long time to be processed due to legal challenges and civil strife, say stretching at least until the Electoral College vote on December 14? Given the serious, costly, and truly unprecedented preparations for the post-election counting battle by political leaders, I’d say no less than 30 percent (but you can assign your own number).

After that, what’s the likelihood that the Electoral College vote will not be decisive due to legal challenges? Perhaps only half of that, so we’re at 15 percent.

At that point, the House of Representatives gets to decidethe President. Yet, both parties have ways of stalemating the process, resulting in a full-blown constitutional crisis with no clear legal resolution. I’d put the likelihood of that at two-thirds of 15 percent, so 10 percent.

Now imagine what the future for your work and life would look like if the civil strife and legal challenges lasted only through the Electoral College vote. What kind of problems might come up for you and how can you solve them?

For example, stock up on consumables and medicine, and get ready for curfews and other policing measures against civil disorder. Importantly, prepare psychologically for the traumatic consequences of this scenario.

How many resources would you require to address problems? Add them up, and multiply them by 30 percent. Then, go on to use those resources to prepare for this possibility.

Next, consider what problems you might face, and what resources you might need, if the Electoral College vote is indecisive, and this situation goes into early January. Multiple these resources by 15 percent. Finally, evaluate the problems, opportunities, and resources needed if the House voting ends in an impasse and a constitutional crisis, and multiply these by 10 percent.

Using this approach, you distribute your problem-solving, opportunity-taking, and resources across the different possibilities in accordance with your chosen evaluations. By doing so, you’re essentially buying insurance to protect yourself from election disaster.