Minnesota Public Radio has a few photos of disputed ballots in the Franken-Coleman recount, and asks voters to weigh in on how each voter’s intent should be decided.
Some are fairly obvious:
This one requires a little more interpretation, but again the voter intent is clear enough to me (though not to an automatic counting machine):
Here we [...]
Congratulations to Sam Wang and the Princeton Election Consortium.
The Electoral College
Outcome: Obama 365 EV, McCain 173. The map (NE 2 not shown):
FiveThirtyEight: 348.5 EV. Error: 18.5 EV.
Electoral-vote.com: 353 EV. Error: 12 EV.
The last-day Median EV Estimator for Obama: 352 EV. Error: 13 EV.
Our prediction: Obama 364 EV, McCain 174. Error:1 EV.
Closest: Princeton Election Consortium.
Individual state [...]
Most states allocate their Electoral College electors on a statewide winner-take-all basis. The exceptions are Maine and Nebraska, which give an elector to the winner of each congressional district (the other two electors go to the state wide winner). It’s not quite (or even close to) proportional representation, as evidenced by the fact that neither [...]
That was the heading for this NY Times chart:
This map shows each state re-sized in proportion to the relative influence of the individual voters who live there. The numbers indicate the total delegates to the Electoral College from each state, and how many eligible voters a single delegate from each state represents.
The accompanying article describes [...]
Proposition 11: Redistricting. Constitutional Amendment and Statute.
Creates 14-member redistricting commission responsible for drawing new district lines for State Senate, Assembly, and Board of Equalization districts. Requires State Auditor to randomly select commission members from voter applicant pool to create a commission with five members from each of the two largest political parties, and four members [...]
I’ve had this post waiting in draft form for quite a while (the article in question appeared almost two years ago). It seems apropos to my last post, so no more procrastinating (on this post, anyway).
In a fascinating paper published at the end of 2006 in Science, Kathleen Vohs et al report on nine experiments [...]
Sam Wang again, moving from the effects of cell phones to the effect of race on polls.
The disappearing Bradley effect:
A hot topic among polling nerds is the “Bradley effect,” which occurs when a non-white (usually black) candidate falls short of opinion polls on Election Day when he/she runs against a white candidate. For this [...]
Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium estimates the cell phone effect at about 1%. What’s the cell phone effect? The general idea is that a) pollsters mostly don’t call cell phones, b) more and more people have only cellphones and are thus not included in polls, and c) those people may have systematically different [...]
So, this came up yesterday as we were drinking a little bubbly before (or was it after?) a performance of All’s Well That Ends Well at Shakespeare Santa Cruz. It’s an apparent paradox that shows up in some kinds of voting methods as well. I say “apparent” because we’re merely fooled by our assumption that [...]
Aidan Hartley in the NY TImes.
John Stuart Mill addresses this problem in Representative Government, sounding, to our ears, more than a little paternalistic. But surely it’s also true that elections are a necessary but not sufficient element of a democratic society.
Democracy by Other Means
Kenyan democracy has failed because ordinary people were encouraged to believe [...]
OpenSTV 1.1 has been released.
OpenSTV is a Python-based program with a reasonable GUI for counting elections using a variety of STV and selected other rules. I’ve been participating in the project in a small way as a developer; so far I’ve worked mainly o Mac OS X support. Standalone versions of the program are available [...]
Brad DeLong.
Cognitive Disabilities in Investment:
People have brains designed by evolution to figure out whether it’s safe to leap to the next branch and when the fruit is ripe. They don’t have brains designed to make long-run investment decisions.
On the pitfalls of self-managed retirement accounts.