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How Close Were US Presidential Elections?
Mike Sheppard writes "I'm a graduate student in Statistics at Michigan State University and spent some time analyzing past US presidential elections to determine how close they truly were. The mathematical procedures of Linear Programming and 0-1 Integer Programming were used to find the optimal solution to the question: 'What is the smallest number of total votes that need to be switched from one candidate to another, and from which states, to affect the outcome of the election?' Because of the way the popular and electoral votes interact, the outcome of the analysis had some surprising and intriguing results. For example, in 2004, 57,787 votes would have given us President Kerry; and in 2000, 269 votes would have given us President Gore. In all there have been 12 US Presidential elections that were decided by less than a 1% margin; meaning if less than 1% of the voters in certain states had changed their mind to the other candidate the outcome of the election would have been different."
"269 votes would have given us President Gore"
And eight years of being reminded of that sad fact can take a toll on a man's soul that can't be quantified.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
If 269 votes had been counted that weren't, and they were for Gore, it all would have been different. This is a good reason to not stop recounts from going forward...
actually vote for a non-Republican, Diebold will give is the president that it thinks is best for us anyway.
Monstar L
Same thing. Different pair of liars. Vote for the one you dislike the least.
Some would contend (and I have difficulty disagreeing) that, in 2000, 269 votes still wouldn't have given us President Gore - it would have just given us 269 more rejected ballots...
The republican VP candidate is usually smarter than this year. Not necessarily 'better', mind you, but usually at least allowed to speak in public.
[/troll]
Sweet informative mod.
McAfee anti-virus software decided our president...
You know, there was this guy I actually really liked. But it seems you can't be a candidate if you are too staunch a defender of freedom!
Circumcision is child abuse.
The only thing really different is the internet and availability of information. Previously, we had the TV networks, newspapers and radio. And that was pretty much it.
Now, with so many avenues of info, there is a lot to choose from. Sadly, a lot of people only go to those sources which simply reinforce what they already believe.
This one started even earlier than usual, and the primary schedule (Iowa and New Hampshire excepted) tends to change every 4 years as states jockey for position. Other than that, and of course the particular candidates and issues in play, it's about the same.
One word of advice: vote for the candidate whose judgment in a crisis you trust most. Whatever they are promising will be so hacked by Congress that it usually doesn't matter in the long run. MHO, YMMV.
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
Assuming the stats are true, it means Slashdot can determine the outcome of the election. Scary! :)
It also means that you should all make the effort to vote and be happy with the outcome or know that you have the right to bitch about the outcome because you voted for the other guy.
Efforts like "Rock the Vote" to raise awareness really are worthwhile. If you haven't voted lately, please do.
Same thing. Different pair of liars. Vote for the one you dislike the least.
Sad, but true.
We need instant run-off-voting. Voting should never about the 'lesser of two asshats'.
My blog
there were only 9 votes that counted, and switching 1 would have done it.
The fact that so many elections are so close seems to indicate that 'the people' don't have a strong preference for one candidate over another. Why? Because their policies are often nearly indistinguishable.
Look at this election for instance. Even on the issue of withdrawing from Iraq, both candidates plan to withdraw troops from Iraq based on conditions on the ground, and send them into Iraq. Neither of these candidates are going to stand up against this upcoming bank welfare bill. Even the candidate for "change" has voted with the Bush administration to protect telecoms from consequences for their illegal spying on Americans. And yet, people seem to think that this is "the most important election of our time". Bullshit.
So yeah 1% might swing the outcome of an election, but it's going to take more than 1% to cause any sort of real change. You might as well flip a coin, you'll get a 50/50 split that way too.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
"It also shows the importance of every vote and in protecting the rights of all to be able to cast their vote."
I would've said it's the opposite - that this shows how many elections, statistically speaking, are ties.
If voting were science, I'd have to reject the vote as inconclusive if the vote tallies are less than two standard deviations apart. What this is saying is that so many election are decided by "noise", not because there is a clear preference for one candidate or the other.
But, voting isn't science. It's politics.
Vote 3rd party. I don't care who, just vote 3rd party.
Voting for the same shit in a different bag is throwing your vote away. A 3rd party vote is the only one that matters.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
No, you can be a candidate, you're just marginalized as a "crazy," or a "moon-bat," as in: "You think people ought to be more responsible for themselves? That's just crazy talk!"
Stupid sexy Flanders.
The last 4 or so have been the worse. Elections are bringing out the worst in Americans, in my opinion. Gone are the days of agreeing to disagree, understanding compromise, accepting the fact that your friend might just vote the other way. Now it's war. It's getting to the point where you just don't bring it up in polite conversation. Yes, to an extent it's always been thus but peruse Slashdot and any other discussion board and you'll see people nearly advocating the death of the other side. We have a long way to go before we're united.
I don't really understand this about US (or possibly any other) election system. In science, the margin of error for measurements being taken, or due to inherent flaws in a mechanism used gets quoted and becomes part of the results. If the margin of error is too large, results are inconclusive. Can we really vouch for any president elected by votes well within the margin of error for the combined effect of disparate tallying systems, vendors, and human fallibility? Has any system in the country ever been more accurate than 1% margin of error—or some ridiculous amount like 269 votes?
Seems unlikely.
Read: Rabbit Rue - Free serial nove
Aren't there more than two candidates?
How about just voting for the candidate you like better?
Maybe if 10% or even 20% of the voters did that, even if those candidates don't win, maybe the two parties will start swinging towards the direction those voters prefer.
Right now if > 99% of the voters vote for the two parties, the two parties can claim they are representing > 99% of the voters.
So you'd be voting for "Same Old Same Old" or "Hit Me Baby One More Time".
If the results of the vote are within statistical error (which is a LOT bigger than 269 votes), the election should be thrown out and run again. Plain science; the kind that politicians will never allow. They'll claim that would be too confusing for most voters. That is, thay'll say we are in the aggregate too stupid. SOME people may be, but most of us aren't. We are, however, too apathetic. The election in 2000 was blatantly rigged, yet the populace just grumbled. I guess I'll move to canada. The US government has been hijacked.
On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth
I live in a state that went Republican in 2000, and I realized afterward that if a thousand or so additional people voted for Gore, then the whole Florida recount issue would have been moot.
That is the example that I give to people nowadays that say, "I don't bother to vote. I mean, there are millions of people. My vote doesn't count."
If you don't vote, then you shouldn't complain when the you don't like the results of the election.
"May I have ten thousand marbles, please?"
Too many people don't want to be free anymore. They want to be taken care of. No good can come from that mindset.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
The "cool kids" will, of course, tell you that everything is the same, everything sucks, and you should give up on trying to make a positive change in any part of your life or any part of your country.
Those people are dead wrong. Thats what they said about Gore and Bush, and I think its pretty obvious that a Gore presidency would have been 100% better for America. Dont give in to mindless peer-pressured apathy.
I liked the idea of Ron Paul too, and his points about the banking system have become hilariously obvious in the last few weeks, but it's just not meant to be. Our elections don't run on sapient points anymore, but marketing. I'm fairly certain our system could sell snow to Eskimos, and human beings, due to their easily predictable and exploitable reactions to measured stimuli and various psychological research, are trivially manipulable.
And like it or not, the entrenched Republican and Democrat parties have too much terminal momentum to be so easily thwarted. It'll probably be different in a couple generations, but different isn't necessarily better. I'm curious, but not too optimistic, given how closely history is repeated due to human nature.
Read: Rabbit Rue - Free serial nove
Citizens within a state are actually voting for a "slate" of electors for their state who are committed to voting for whoever wins that state. Occasionally, there are a few states who divide those electoral votes proportionally.
I know it sounds a little off, but what it protects is the rural/suburban voter and the states with smaller populations, so that they have a say in the overall process. It helps put the state of Iowa, for example, on a little more equal footing with New York with its higher population. It also helps keep candidates from completely pandering to high-population urban areas and ignoring the rest of us. Its main problem is that it could be more proportional (divide electoral college votes proportionally within a state rather than winner-take-all), and tends to relegate the final outcome to a handful of states (Florida in 2000, Ohio 2004).
You could just look it up on Wikipedia It's a pretty interesting article. If your into that sort of thing.
"I'm a Genius!"*
*Not an actual Genius
Do your research and vote for the candidate you like most, major parties be damned. You'll hear people tell you, "a vote for a third party is a vote for (whichever candidate they don't like)." This is not true, and is the very thing which keeps us locked in a two party system.
Vote with the person who seems intelligent, and qualified to lead. Not the one who uses amorphous taglines like, "hope," "change," and "new America" (this isn't a slight against Obama, however he is using these words with very few actual moves towards any real genuine change in politics - on slashdot this is more evident than most places).
Finally, its your vote. Don't get bought, sold, or caught up in rhetoric. You are an intelligent person. To quote yet another musician, "There is a war being waged for your mind. If you are thinking, you are winning."
As grandparent said, if such a differentially small amount of voters can have such a drastic change in how a country is governed, something is wrong. You say 50% is happy with the result, but you might as well say that 50% is unhappy with the result. If a political system results in such an outcome, then perhaps it needs to be changed in such a way as to make compromise outcomes more likely. You'll have to agree with me that if say 80% were sort of happy with the result, that would have been a much better outcome than what we actually got.
P.S. I'm saying this as a fairly conservative person, so don't go all 'you're just sour you lost' on me. Also, ad hominem is a logical fallacy.
The winner-take-all selection of state electoral votes isn't something described or even mentioned in the U.S. Constitution.... and it is a mistake to think that it has to be the only system for selecting candidates for the U.S. Presidency either.
I think California would benefit from having a proportional selection of electors, where even a 4%-5% shift in votes would still be gaining a few extra electoral votes for each candidate. It would also give a chance for 3rd party candidates to actually get some legitimate electoral votes... which is perhaps why it won't ever be done.
Absolutely. The fact is that neither of the major candidates represent the people. They represent corporate interests first and foremost. Voting for one or the other simply continues the mandate of the corporate oligarchy. The two party system is an illusion, there is one corporate party with an absolute stranglehold on American politics. If we ever want to restore freedom to this country, we have to break it, and voting 3rd party is the only way short of revolution.
Don't blame Nader voters for following their conscience. Blame Gore for not representing policies they could vote for in good conscience.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I liked Ron Paul's views on the economy and his foreign policy, unfortunately he is also a misogynist, homophobe, and a religious nut.
That's probably what everyone has heard, because that's what tends to be written in the history books that make it past school boards.
However, there are actually good historical records of the deiliberations at the constitutional convention, and this is not true. The system we have, along with the Senatorial system and the now obsolete 3/5ths rule and a whole buch of other little rules and clauses nobody pays much attention to anymore, were all pushed by the slave states, and their allies in the north. Their worry was that in a straight democracy the more populous (and at the time more religous) North would simply vote slavery out of existance. The entire system of government we have was designed to prevent the North from ever being able to do that. Nearly any good or bad feature of the electoral college system is just a side-effect.
... which doesn't reward voters of (literally) third parties. Other countries have it different - today's Germany, for example has 5 parties in parliament - conservatives, social democrats, liberals, greens and leftists. Especially green parties exist in many countries, but really haven't got any chance in systems that favor big parties - like the US or UK.
Large constrained optimization problems get solved all the time, algorithms like simplex scale nicely and the computer doesn't care that you've thrown hundreds of variables at it (well, it bogs down a bit, especially with non-linearities).
I've been paid rather well to consult on problems like this. The biggest they thought there was something wrong with their solver, but it was just bad data. The people collecting the data had been given inconsistent instructions, things like "measure at the beginning of the year" vs "measure halfway through the year". Garbage in, garbage out, and no fancy algorithm is going to save you.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
This is an ill-formed question at best, nonsense at worst. We don't randomly select people to vote from the population, then we could make some inferences like you mention. We, in essence, have the complete census of those that voted, so inferential statistics are not needed, and in fact, meaningless. If we do assume that random people showed up to vote, I suppose we could easily compute p-values, but I don't know how valuable that would be. The sample size is so large that in all but extreme cases (e.g., FL/2000), we would find highly significant results even with a small delta...
The reason we haven't been attacked on American soil is due solely to the magic rock that I keep in my pocket. I put it in my pocket on 9/12/01, and there hasn't been an attack since, except for the numerous (daily?) mortar and rocket attacks on our embassy in Iraq which are probably nothing more than a proximity effect. Same with the hundreds killed and thousands wounded by munitions provided to insurgent Iraqis by the Iranians. In other words, if me and my magic rock leave the USA, you're all fucked.
"I suggest you read up on corporate finance because your post indicates a profound misunderstanding of the current economical crisis' ACTUAL source : Deregulation of investmebnt banking"
You sir, are quite full of shit. The repeal of Glass-Steagall simply allowed regular banks to get into other financial activities... stocks, bonds, etc. It didn't have a damn thing to do A) the government pressuring banks to give home loans to people that didn't qualify for them, and B) banks caving and giving those loans out of fear of being labled "racist". One political schmuck was saying last night that these "ninja loans"... no income, no assetts, were morally good because "the free market doesn't work for poor people".
The Glass-Steagall repeal also wasn't responsible for the culture of easy credit that helped get us into this mess. This is largely a failure of responsibility on the part of all the American people, rich and poor, democratic and republican. We abandoned responsibility, and now the bill is coming due. Victor Davis Hanson had it right... we're victims, but not innocent victims. We stopped seeing homes as a place to live, and starting seeing them as a way to make a quick buck by "flipping" them after some minor improvements. We all did things that made the price of homes shoot through the roof, far above any rational standard, and now reality has set in. The McMansions were never worth a million dollars or more. That was paper inflation, and we greedily, eagerly helped keep their prices inflated. We made it worse by taking out mortgages we couldn't afford.
One finance guy on Bloomberg made an excellent point yesterday. There would be no crisis if these mortgage holders were paying their bills. That's what it all comes down to. So spare me the bullshit about deregulation. This isn't about regulations, it's about responsibility. When the government did try new regulations to reform Fannie/Freddie in 2003, it was blocked, largely by Democrats, because the tightened lending standards for minorities and the poor would have been "unfair".
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I've wondered about that too. How does someone with $3000/month income get into a $3000/month mortgage?? Oh, adjustable rates. THIS year it's just $1000. NEXT year, it'll be $3000. You'll get a raise by then, won't you??
From your previous post, "We stopped seeing homes as a place to live, and starting seeing them as a way to make a quick buck by "flipping" them after some minor improvements."
No shit. And the upshot is that now ordinary people on ordinary wages can no longer afford to buy an ordinary house, and often can't afford to RENT it either.
Check out these threads for how it affects real people in real life:
http://www.city-data.com/forum/montana/44408-why-some-people-so-mad.html
This is the same mentality as everywhere tho -- CEOs are doing the same thing with business. Get in, "improve" the bottom line, grab that golden parachute, get out before the "improvements" collapse the business; take your very selective resume to the next company, rinse and repeat. It's just flipping for businesses.
No one seems content with steady and stable anymore. Gotta have "growth" or they're not happy.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Greed is the real problem and if you even say the word greed you might as well have stripped naked and said FUCK on TV. Short run thinking like the kind we've been seeing that took down Tyco, Enron and now the collapse we're seeing, is fueled typically by greed. Who cares if the company's not around in 2 years if I can make a million in a year and a half and get out?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.