In 1983, a young, well-coiffed David Copperfield conjured up a magic trick so bombastic and implausible in an analog world that 50 million viewers stayed home on a Friday night to watch the Statue of Liberty disappear before a live TV audience.

Why could something so clearly unreal captivate 50 million people (including me) into thinking it’s real?

Copperfield lamented that the word “trick” diminished the sophisticated planning and choreography behind the illusion. Good magic is hard work. Believing in magic is not. It requires little cognitive effort or bandwidth. Our “fast” thinking system uses heuristics, or mental shortcuts, to speed up conclusions. Information that comes to mind more easily, factual or not, is weighted more heavily.

But shortcuts lead to errors. That’s when our more effortful “slow” thinking system intervenes to correct these quick intuitions. The problem researchers like Daniel Kahneman found is though slower critical thinking can correct our “fast” thinking, it is also a pushover if what is right is not what we want to believe. In those cases, fast, or inaccurate, thinking wins.

So, when the giant curtain came down to reveal Lady Liberty was missing, the 20-person live audience did not immediately think their point of view simply had been altered by a rotating platform or obscured by curtain scaffolding. For those wanting to believe she can disappear, it most surely did. Belief in magic helped fill the void of their unknown.

Like Copperfield, skilled politicians are illusionists. And we are the live audience rotating on a platform seeing what they want us to see.

Two recent examples in Kansas come to mind.

Take the August ballot question to elect or not elect Supreme Court justices. “The citizens of Kansas who are qualified electors shall elect the justices of the supreme court.” On the face of it, a simple “yes” or “no” decision. The illusion is a benevolent Legislature gifting us extraordinary powers to select justices instead of the governor and a bunch of lawyers.

But what of the second line? “The rules applicable for such elections and the designation of position numbers shall be provided by law.” Translated … the Legislature, not you, will hold true power as de facto selectors when they approve partisan district boundaries. Poof! With sleight of hand, the platform turns to obscure this point. They know you want to believe voting is the democratic thing to do. And if you hear enough noise about activist justices, true or not, you’ll weigh it more heavily with your “fast” vote.

Another example is one of Gov. Kelly’s last vetoes in office — HB 2043 — an eleventh hour “property tax” bill passed by Republicans giving 10% of city/county voters the power to strike down local budgets where revenue exceeded the smaller of 3% or inflation. She called it a “false promise” since the concept guaranteed zero reduction in property taxes. The same for a constitutional amendment capping annual property value increases at 3% championed by the Senate.

Kelly was fair. They do not guarantee relief. They are illusions.

And if you want property tax relief so badly and hear enough times local government is to blame, you might not see the Legislature’s irresponsible budgeting, the Senate president killing sales tax initiatives in six counties, or a real package guaranteeing property tax relief that preserves local control.

In the end, the most powerful illusions aren’t the ones we fail to see in magic shows and politics –they’re the ones we choose to believe.

— Bill Fiander is a university lecturer in Kansas specializing in public administration, urban planning, and state/local government.