Four federal by-elections are coming on Monday, and you may be wondering: who’s going to win?

Don’t ask me.

No, seriously: don’t ask me. I’m a journalist and every now and then, I make the case for people in my trade to stay out of the election-prediction business.

With four reasonably important votes coming on Monday, it seems as good a time as any to make the case again. It can be boiled down to three basic arguments:

First, we run the risk of looking stupid or being wrong.

Now, many people would say that journalists run this risk every day, and they’re probably correct. And this reasoning, to be honest, is the weakest of arguments against journalist predictions.

But we should note that the recent past is littered with examples of very wrong predictions by journalists and pollsters: the unexpected victories of incumbent provincial government parties in B.C., Alberta and Ontario, to name a few.

Those wrong-headed predictions just gave another opening for critics to howl about how lame the media is, because we constantly fail to predict the future. As far as I know, psychic powers are not among the required skill set for political reporters. But when we make predictions, we lead the public to believe that crystal balls are as vital to our profession as tape recorders.

Second, the minute we make a prediction, in my opinion, we step off the spectator’s stands and on to the field. Media predictions almost inevitably become part of the political game.

An example: Back in 1993, when campaigns were still 60 days long, I spent most of the two months of that election aboard Jean Chrétien’s Liberal tour. Certainly it felt like the red team was doing well from our viewpoint — but then again, we were going to Liberal events, 18 hours a day.

About a week before election day, some members of the media aboard the campaign tour started an election pool and taped up a piece up a paper on a wall in the Liberal plane, upon which reporters could write their predicted results.

I refused to play. I can’t say I knew exactly why it felt like a bad idea (again, I’m not into predictions) but it just seemed there was something instinctively wrong about reporters publicly declaring how they thought the whole 1993 vote would turn out. (The Liberals won, by the way, by a lot.) Sure enough, Chrétien wandered to the back of the plane at some point after the pool entries were posted on the wall and took a good look. At one of his subsequent campaign stops, he declared he was doing so well that the media aboard his bus believed he’d win a majority.

Great. The media had become a campaign prop for him. Who’d have predicted that?

Third, this whole business of making predictions chips away at the idea of fair coverage — the very essence of our work.

If we decide that one side is going to win, other decisions follow, whether consciously or unconsciously. Those decisions can influence the result. We may decide to give more coverage to the person or team we’ve predicted to be the winner. We may take the rivals less seriously.

To some extent, we do some sorting already: we cover the major parties in general elections more than the parties who don’t have seats in the Commons. This became an issue in 2008 and 2011 over whether Green Leader Elizabeth May should be included in the TV debates, you’ll remember.

But deciding the winner is a higher order of sorting. It ignores the fact that the media, like it or not, can nudge an election in one direction or another, and people may cast a ballot for or against a prevailing trend. And too often, we see the pundit class simply declaring a likely winner based on polls or assembled commentary from other pundits. We can’t simply throw up our hands and say: “Well, it’s just my opinion, no one has to listen to it.” If we want to ask the public to trust us — as we do every day — then we have to accept the responsibility of that trust.

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A former boss once told me that the worst reporters in her experience were the ones who thought they knew everything. The best journalists, she said, are constantly nagged by worries about what they don’t know.

Fundamentally, this is what bugs me about election predictions — it seems political reporters should always be open to surprise and the unexpected, and what they don’t know already. That’s the essence of news, isn’t it?

So, who’s going to win on Monday night? I think the best answer comes from what another former editor of mine used to say when asked the same question: “The one who gets the most votes.”