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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."
I'm 22, and this is the first presidential election I've ever actually even listened to. Can somebody who is 26 or older tell me, is there anything different about this election than the last one, or does it pretty much run this same route every time? i.e. is media focus the same, before and after the primaries, and so on?
This shows how easy it would be to swing the election should one hack the voting in a few districts. The analysis can be used to show the regions to focus on.
This shows the importance of maintaining an open and audit able process if the system is to be protected from manipulation.
It also shows the importance of every vote and in protecting the rights of all to be able to cast their vote.
How many votes of this 1% were miscounted by voting machines?
So, not trying to win, but make your opponent lose, and force the tie-breaker where the rules are in your favor. Very interesting strategy, I don't know if it was good or bad that it failed. I don't remember the Whig platform.
"I'm a Genius!"*
*Not an actual Genius
It's time for electoral reform. As a precursor to that, I think reform of the media will be necessary.
I have a friend who's in political PR, and he tells me that my dream of "corrections in the media should be given equal billing to the original misinformation" (i.e. if you splash falsehoods onto the front page in big letters, you can't post your apology on page 79 column 5) will never happen: "never argue with someone who buys their ink in barrels". I think the very fact this truism is grounded in ink belies a 20th century mentality, but I don't know enough about the media to be able to judge whether he's right or not. Do any slashdot readers think a grassroots campaign to stop the media shooting first and asking questions later has legs?
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
I have said in the past (since before 2000) that the very strong trend toward fifty-fifty splits between rivals only proves that Marketing is now an Engineering Problem.
To explain: all endeavors start as artforms, like "the tuning of these newfangled carburetors is a bit of a black art." Then you understand the general system well enough to call it a science, "we have found that if we measure the fuel mixture, we maximize combustion." Once the system is known very well, it is an engineering problem: "an electronic system monitors the mixture and adjusts for different conditions on the fly."
Just as the cola wars are in a well-settled detente, the business of national politics is a marketing endeavor. Whether you're Demopublican or Replicratic, whether you're a Preservative or a Libertine, your party system will simply apply the art, nee, the science, nee, the engineering methodology to ensure the candidates do the best they can. Of course, both sides have effectively infinite resources so the marketing comes out equal, and the course of history witnesses Gore/Bush 2000, too many 5-4 decisions to count, a roughly 50-51 Senate, and a dynamic but well-balanced electoral college.
We seem to be deadlocked into a 50%/50% world, regardless of the actual merits. Marketing is simply engineering the "choices" we have, and equally effectively on "both" sides of just about every political issue.
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It's an almost textbook example of optimization theory - assume there's two ice cream booths on a beach [0..1] with a uniform distribution of guests, now the optimal for the beach guests would having them at 1/4 and 3/4, but then each could steal customers by moving towards the center. End result you got two booths right next to each other in the middle, each serving half the guests. As long as any other booths can't enter (winner takes it all-system) that situation is stable. Any disturbance like the guest moving over to one side of the beach because it got better sun in the afternoon and the dividing line will move, again leaving half on each side. If you want clearer objective proof that having 40% of the votes it useless in the US, this is it. The politicians must redefine their politics so they're fighting for the majority, rather than stay true to anything.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
This thread is bound to get political so here goes, as long as you can say you're anti-abortion and anti-gay you pretty much have most of the southern states wrapped up thanks to the Evangelical Christians.
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
A "feature" (probably unintended) of the design of the Electoral College system is that most elections look like more of a blowout than they were. In theory, if someone manages to consistently get 50.5% in every state, they could win every state and the public will be told the next morning about the victor's huge landslide victory.
That's why after the 2000 election the Reps floated around those red state/blue state US maps with such glee. It made a squeaker look like a huge victory. (For a better picture, see the University of Michagan , which use some cartiographical tricks to adjust for population).
A better illustration are Regan's victories. Everyone knows Regan clobbered Carter and Mondale, right? Well, the true answer is not really, and sorta respectively. The electoral college turned his %50.7 victory in 1980 into a %86 state victory, and his %58.8 victory in 1984 into a %94 state victory.
It has been argued that this effect is actually good for the country, as it gives presidents more legitimacy from their elections.
I think the summary is misleading. It's not just a random 269 votes from all around the country that would have changed the outcome in 2000. 269 more votes for all gore in Pennsylvania wouldn't have done anything for Gore. I'm going to assume that the optimal 269 votes the story is referring to come from Florida, probably Miami-Dade. It's adding undue drama to the situation to say that 269 votes could have changed things. It's a very specific 269 votes from a very specific, and relatively small percentage of the population, that could have changed the outcome of the election.
I have the heart of a child. I keep it in a jar
OK, we have some instances of small fluctuations causing major effects. Rather than just sitting back and says "wow, that was close", the next stage is to calculate the possibility of these events being statistically random.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The simplest solution is to make it a legal requirement for everyone to vote, and to provide a "none-of-the-above" for those who can't make a choice (otherwise they would just spoil their voting paper anyway).
It happens anywhere there is an election. There will always be "safe seats" where the population will always vote for one party (rich wealthy areas vote for the "lower taxes for rich people" party, and the low income areas vote for the "tax the middle classes for social services" party. In the end, the party campaigners only go after the swing seats where there is no outright majority for any party. Changing election boundaries might be one way of solving this, but low income areas tend to have a higher housing density and so have a smaller catchment area.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
It makes you wonder how history might have been different if one particular die in a stamping machine at some paper plant had been just a little sharper.
The government should reward people if they vote, say a voter stimulus package of $100 sent to you in the mail after confirming that you showed up at the polls and voted.
This might be the only way to increase voter turnout, therefore creating a stronger 'Democracy' or whatever it actually is these days.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
This seems to be in the nature of the political system of the USA, if you think about it.
Both large parties are diverse conglomerates, containing people who often disagree significantly on important issues. The big question for the party is where to draw the border of the part affiliation. Who is in, and who is out?
The answer to that is that the optimal popular appeal for a party is 50% plus one vote. Less, and you lose the election. More, and you have increased the internal stress in the party and reduced the size everybody's slice of power, for no real purpose. The art of winning elections is to convince the median voter without alienating the rabid zealots at the other end of the party too much.
So the two parties will always align themselves around the median voter. Close elections are in the nature of the system.
One of the things that surprised me the most in the analysis here is that Hawaii shows up so often in the recent elections as a swing state that could have made a huge difference.
Generally speaking, Hawaii is written off in national elections and only gets marginal attention in Presidential elections. It certainly isn't mentioned as a traditional swing state like Ohio, Michigan, or Florida... perhaps because of the small number of electoral votes. In a close election, however, even a few electoral votes can make a difference.
Other states that perhaps shouldn't have surprised me so much were New Mexico and Iowa... both relatively smaller states but have had close presidential election vote totals as well in several of the past elections. They do show up quite a bit.
For somebody planning a campaigning strategy approach for one of the major candidates, this is some incredibly interesting analysis and could suggest some approaches that haven't been looked at due to "conventional wisdom" thinking some states were more important when some of these smaller states could make a big difference.
BTW, that was a deliberate campaign strategy for the George W. Bush re-election team in 2004.
Alternatively, Gore could have run a better campaign, starting with winning his home state's 11 electoral votes that would have made the Florida result irrelevant. How his campaign managed their resources had as much to do with an election that came down to 269 votes as any other factor (maybe more).
FDR tried and failed to fix the 1930s recession..... it ultimately took a world war to bring-back full employment. Without the war, FDR would have been voted out of office in 1940, and the recession would have stretched through most of the 1940s.
Obama faces what FDR faced, and Obama's not going to be any more successful. (Unless a war saves him.)
Why is it we always praise wars for bringing full employment? I hate to use the cheesedick "war on x" phrases but seriously, what if we were literally do pull out all the stops and mobilize the population on the scale of total war but make the enemy be shoddy infrastructure or crappy housing or something. Instead of marshaling the entire industrial might of the nation towards turning out bombers and tanks, why not treat the whole war as a massive public works project? Make the government the employer of last resort. "If private industry cannot provide work for our good citizens, the government will employ them in something as close to their profession as possible, working towards the public good." It's unemployment benefits that don't keep you out of work and gives the government a tangible return for the money. When the economy picks up, the private sector can start hiring the workers back.
We've been cutting back on investing in infrastructure for decades, it'd be good to put some money back into our country again. Set a goal of getting us off fossil fuels over the next two decades, put government labs to work on seriously making a go of fusion power, green living, reshape our cities to be less energy intensive.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
"Notice how when a point is proven you just ignore and try to make a different one?"
1. No, that was my first post in this topic
2. I'm disputing that we have 'won' by any reasonable measure in either theatre.
Yes, 289 is the _smallest_ number of voters that could be switched to change the result of the election. But that gives a misleading picture of how close it was. You should also consider the largest number of voters that could switch without changing the result: that is several million votes (for example, Texas voted for Bush; switch 24.999% of the votes Texas cast to Bush to Gore, and the result does not change). In other words huge numbers of people (outside Florida and other swing states) could have decided to vote for Gore (or Nader) instead of Bush and it wouldn't have made the slightest difference.
Perhaps the fairest measure of the closeness of an election is: what is the smallest number N of votes such that if you picked N individual votes at random across the whole country and flipped them, there is more than a 50% probability that the result would change?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
This depends on where you get your news. Afghanistan isn't an American operation the way Iraq is. There is a big Canadian and UK presence there too, so check news sources from those countries. The Canadians in particular are in southern Afghanistan/Kandahar and see more action than just about anybody, so there is plenty of news coverage on the CBC, including reporters' blogs, etc.
The Florida issue came down to 1) who gets to decide whether someone else's ballot is improper or not, 2) does Florida's 'legal code' or its interpretation violate the higher authority (Article 14 of the US Constitution) requiring Florida to not mess with your right to vote, and 3) who gets to decide number 2). It turns out the Supreme Court gets the final answer, and they (like all of us) answered down party lines. If Bush v. Gore situation were reversed, would you be supporting the other guy right now? I seriously doubt it.
I don't NEED to know the man. I don't know Hitler, personally, but I still know he was not a nice man.
Going by the number of deaths he is responsible for - probably about a million. That puts him about on a par with Augusto Pinochet. Below Genghis Khan (30 million), but not far off a Hitler (10 million) or Stalin (10 million).
You thought you could break the laws of physics without paying the PRICE?
Barack Obama wasn't actually in the Senate when the joint resolution was discussed and eventually passed on 2 October 2002. However, he was busy making an excellent speech at a Chicago anti-war rally. Barack wasn't elected until 2004. Still, had he been in Congress at the time, he would have voted against it and he has repeatedly supported withdrawal from Iraq.
I've asked this question many times: Where are all the McCain supporters? Apparently, 45 percent of the nation is voting for John McCain -- I don't know why they feel that way or who they are. Granted, I am in college and we young people really like this Obama character, but I have yet to talk to a McCain supporter. Sure, some feel that Obama is not to be trusted (should anyone be given the level of trust we give the president?) or that he lacks experience (does anyone have the right experience for the unknown?), but all of these people are still voting for him, because they see McCain as far worse.
When it comes down to it, I can't see myself voting for someone that supports teaching creationism as a science -- I've talked in front of the Kansas School Board against doing so. I can't see myself voting for someone who does not support net neutrality. I can't see myself voting for someone with a vice president who doesn't know what a VP does. I can't see myself voting with a party that has a ridiculous double-standard. Conveniently, all these shortcomings lay with one candidate. </logicalFallacy:paradeOfHorrors>
My UID is a prime number. Yeah, I planned that.
I voted for McCain in 2000 primaries and, disgusted by dirty tricks Bush/Rove pulled, ended up voting for Nader. In Florida. In 2000. By 2004, was registered Independent and this time around, am registered Democrat. Sure, I don't agree with a lot of their issues but man, anything's better than this business cabal that's running the country into the ground. And I was really pulling for McCain last year, until I saw who he surrounded himself with; same old bunch of neo-con advisors. Meh.
Who knows, if the GOP implodes this time around, maybe a true conservative party will rise up, that does embrace small government, fiscal responsibility and a lessening of foreign entanglements. One can hope.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Racism? God I don't even know where to start.
Okay, Glass-Steagall let banks sell financial instruments, namely securities. They developed securities backed by subprime mortgages that were going around thanks to the booming real-estate market and the dotcom bust. Thanks to the absurdly large number of mortgages, these securities got very very sexy. So companies like Lehman Brothers and Bear Sterns invested very heavily into them, and banks like Washington Mutual went balls out trying to sell as many mortgages AND with those mortgages, creating all sorts of wacky securities backed by them.
Had the SEC done it's JOB, it would've known that these securities do not pass the smell test and would've done something about them. Since they were asleep at the fucking wheel, the economy is now in the shitter.
And yes, it'd be a rosy and happy world if mortgage holders could pay back mortgages that are pretty much slanted directly against them, but they can't. The idea was that they'd go through a cycle of refinancings and somehow stay on top of it, even with refinancing, there's no way some of these mortgage holders could've paid off their mortgages. Even worse is that commentators and financial analysts were saying that it was a great time to buy homes and to get a mortgage.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Terrorism was on the Clinton Administration's radar and would probably have been on Gore's too; he didn't forget that the Cole and WTC attacks happened during his vice presidency. He would have taken a report titled "Al Qaeda determined to attack in U.S." seriously. For whatever good that would have done. It still would have happened, largely because it was a type of attack we hadn't seriously considered.
So 9/11 would have happened, and we would have invaded Afghanistan, because I can't imagine any President was a big enough peacenik that they wouldn't, or who could ignore the cries of the public to strike. Hell even Europeans and Canadians were cheering and volunteering to help when we said we were going to go kick the Taliban's ass.
But we would not be in Iraq. Nobody except the neo-cons was championing that cause after 9/11, and without the bully pulpit of the Oval Office, nobody would have listened to them. Nobody with any power would have even thought that was a sane thing to do while the occupation of Afghanistan, "Graveyard of Empires", was still ongoing, much less a prudent and wise thing to do.
I'm not even saying he would have been a good president cus I don't think he would have been, but so what the president we got wasn't good either and we wouldn't be in Iraq. That's more than enough for me.
The enemies of Democracy are
What you are saying seems inconsistent.
Most states do a "winner-take-all" system where the candidate with the most votes gets all of the electors for that state.
Individual votes from ordinary voters do make a difference... in fact a huge difference.
These statements appear to be contradictory. It seems to me, and you seem to agree in the first quote here, that everyone who voted for the less popular candidate(s) in most states will have their vote ignored in the electoral college system, as all the delegates will have voted for the majority-backed candidate. Please correct my logic if I'm in error - this topic really interests me and this seems to be a massive inequity in our (the United States') system.