Democracy is an abuse of statistics.

The line is a sardonic reduction of electoral democracy to arithmetic: counting heads rather than weighing reasons. Calling it an “abuse of statistics” suggests that numerical aggregation (majority rule) is being misapplied to questions of truth, justice, or good governance—domains where Borges implies quantity cannot substitute for judgment. The quip also fits Borges’s recurring skepticism toward mass opinion and political slogans, and his taste for paradox: “statistics,” a tool for describing populations, becomes a blunt instrument for legitimizing power. Read charitably, it is less a technical critique than a warning about confusing legitimacy-by-count with wisdom or moral rightness.