The defensive huddle of pollsters who say the race is too close to call may protect their reputations, but it creates a separate danger: The mudslinging makes it easier for election deniers to challenge the outcome.

Could the investigators mess up again this year? Let’s count the ways. There’s something called non-response bias, where pollsters try to adjust for not reaching enough respondents in a certain demographic—say, voters under 40—by overweighting the few under-40 responses they get. i receive There is the “shy voter” syndrome, whereby voters who perceive a social stigma in their choice simply lie to pollsters. Or maybe it’s the opposite: Voters are getting a rise in shocking pollsters with their outside opinions, but sober in the voting booth. Or another possibility: voters who don’t want to appear racist or sexist will speak well of Harris when they’re actually leaning toward Trump.

There could be a secret women’s vote, where moderate or Republican women rejected by Trump secretly voted for Harris. They won’t even tell their spouses who they’re voting for, let alone a stranger on the phone. And there’s a “recent bias,” where pollsters alter the data to reflect how respondents behaved in the last election. But voters can misremember their votes and—like the millions of baby boomers who insist they were at Woodstock—simply claim they were with the winner.

Survey professionals respond to these biases with ever-increasing cleavage, massaging the data to allow for this or that eventuality. Many have adopted Silver’s innovation of aggregating poll averages from several different sources, which likely helps filter out statistical “noise.” But now there’s a new problem: partisan polls intentionally designed to boost a candidate are letting go with his elbow in the mixture, changing the media. All of these variables—and let’s not forget the weather—make pollsters like Rick Perlstein wrote recently in The American Prospect, “no more scientific than peeping.”

And do I have to add the media’s complicity in polluting the campaign dialogue with breathless coverage of the poll as if it were real?

Everything wakes up your head. The Youth survey that Harvard University leads voters under 30 teased the results of male voters, finding a 17-point margin in favor of Harris among young people who say they will definitely vote. But among young people who are less sure they will vote, the poll found an 11-point preference for Trump — a 28-point swing. As always, the only poll that matters is the poll voters show up for on Election Day.

As a species, humans hate uncertainty. Right now, we’re either gorging ourselves on Halloween candy or practicing deep breathing to calm the anxiety of not knowing. That explains why we hang on to surveys despite being repeatedly burned by them.

But here’s the thing: every poll, by its very nature, speculates about something that is it doesn’t actually happen. Focusing on an unknown future is the antithesis of living in the moment.

So better wait a few days (or, ugh, maybe weeks). Polls try to provide confidence in a result. But as with most trust games, it’s possible to be cheated.

Renée Loth’s column appears regularly on the Globe.