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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
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.
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...
So, Bush 41 beat someone named "Dukasis"?
The maps are the best part, as you can see which parts of the country provided the closest margins. It's also interesting that, in 1976, Hawaii had a smaller number of votes needed to flip it than Delaware (Hawaii is generally considered safely Democratic).
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
How many votes of this 1% were miscounted by voting machines?
McAfee anti-virus software decided our president...
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.
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
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!
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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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
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
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.
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
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
That's gonna cost you soooo many carbon credits !
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?"
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).
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
Sorry pal, but that is what they teach in high school Algebra I/II classes as a stand-in for analytically solving equations.
Inquiring minds want to know: where the fuck do they teach this in Algebra I/II?
P.S. If you've got some way to analytically solve any constrained optimization problem with 50+ variables, there's probably a long line of people with medals and/or piles of cash to give you.
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
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
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.
I'll bet you a nickel that someone else wrote that line.
Nope, that is why he and all the other Hollywood elite get paid so much. They just turn on the cameras, say "Action" and wait for them to come up with amazing plot lines and quotes that will be remembered for ages.
I vaguely remember a strike that happened just recently. I think it was called the actors strike or something similar. Anyway, they said they needed a break from coming up with so many good lines. TV sucked for a few months while they took some time off and regrouped.
When I have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins and then run around the mall looking frantic.
In U.S. Presidential elections, you are voting for electors, not really candidates. In most states, it is the political parties that decide who get to be electors... and usually send a list of electors to the top state election official prior to the election who will represent the candidate of that party when the election is finally held.
Having been involved with major party politics on the state level (as a convention delegate) I've had the somewhat rare privilege of directly voting on who would get onto that list and help select the actual electors to the electoral college. They are usually strongly loyal political leaders... such as governors or county party chairmen who have been serving for decades or longer.
Each state can have as many electors as they have senators and representatives in the U.S. Congress... although it should be noted that all federal officers... including senators and representatives... are constitutionally prohibited from participating as electors.
Also, once the electors have been selected and elected, they are free to vote for whomever they want... for both President and Vice-President, which are treated as two separate voting opportunities. It is possible to vote for two people (pres/vp) of different political parties... and in fact that has happened in the past. An elector in Texas voted for George H.W. Bush as president and Lloyd Bentson (a democrat) as his vp candidate in the 1988 Presidential election. In a couple of cases, the elector screwed up and got the presidential candidate and the vp candidate messed up... casting the vp candidate as a vote for the president and the presidential candidate as the vp. So far none of these "faithless" electors have made a significant impact on the actual election in terms of changing who the victor of the election may be.
Assuming that something tragically happens between the nomination of the candidate and when the electors actually vote... especially if there is a death of a candidate after the election (natural death or assassination), the electors also serve as a line of authority to help decide who is going to become President without having to go through the whole process of selecting a candidates all over again and another national election. This did happen in the 1872 election with the Democratic candidate.
I should also note that it is up to each state to decide how it selects its electors (in terms of from what parties or how they are selected). Most states do a "winner-take-all" system where the candidate with the most votes gets all of the electors for that state. This is not something in the U.S. Constitution, but rather a custom that has developed over the years... and is not universally followed either. Maine and Nebraska both have a split system where each congressional district votes independently for electors, and then the two "senatorial" electors are decided by the state-wide vote.
I hope this isn't putting up more info than you were asking for. Individual votes from ordinary voters do make a difference... in fact a huge difference.
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kerry_Military_Service_Controversy#Document_release
On May 20, 2005 John Kerry signed a 'Standard Form 180', releasing pretty much every possible relevant document, including all his military service, reserve and discharge records, as well as his medical records, to the Associated Press, the Boston Globe, and the Los Angeles Times.
-Chris
Actually, linear programming IS basic algerbra, but is best solved with geometry skills. Simpler formulas are being used in 6th and 7th grade math. Basic linear programming problems, like calculating the best sale price for profit based on demand, are math standards used in Algebra I, Geometry, and statiscics classes alike. In some states using circular math, like NY and Connecticut (tiered learning instead of seperating Algebra from Geometry, from Trig, which is simply stupid to do since they're all interdependent!) Linear programming and advanced logic are taught in the second year of high school math (9th or 10th grade).
But actually, it starts much earlier than High School. My wife teaches 3rd grade now in SC, but Linear programming is one of the standards of math she taught a couple years ago when teaching 4th grade. It appears again in the 6th and 8th grade curriculum standards on the state's PACT test.
The wiki article is highly technical, and goes pretty deep into equasion design, but honestly, you've been using this stuff for years, it just wasn't called "programming" and you didn't use function notation... (and it has no relation to writing software)
This is exactly the same as kids that use calculus, doing derivitives and more for optics experiments and when dealing with simple velocity equasions, in basic physics classes in 6th, 8th and 9th grade years before actually finding out it's called "calculus" because if they actually told kids that, they'd refuse the work and parents would lobby the schools not teach that stuff to kids who had not already taken calculs... Honestly, short form derivitives using the 4 shortcut rules is easier than algerbra, and many people believe it should actually be taught FIRST, after basic math skills but before geometry and trig.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
... 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 -
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
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. These was lobbied for extensively by two people who'se names you might recognize from the current election cycle : Senator John McCain (R-AZ) and Tresury Secretary "Hank" Paulson. Let`s not even go into the Senator`s invovlement in the "Keating 5" savings and loan scandal...
But yes,yes, keep blaming Clinton. It's much easier.
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
People might teach 2D linear programming using geometrical means to some high school but they are decidedly NOT teaching fully blown arbitrary dimension LP with integer constraints like this article is using. Integer programming is an NP-hard problem. I teach this to university seniors.
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.
Actually, 1 vote would have. As Jon Stewart said, "Bush got the minority vote - Clarence Thomas."
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
"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
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
You have completely misunderstood what the parent is talking about. Linear programming doesn't mean solving systems of linear equations, it means maximizing a target function within a system of linear constraints. There is a way to do this geometrically when there are only two variables, which you might have seen in high school, but that approach doesn't work when there are three variables or more. In that case, you would use the Simplex algorithm. It can be done by hand, but the principle is not even remotely the same, and it is certainly not taught in high school.
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?
The University of Richmond has recently created an interactive database with maps of voting in previous elections. You can look as far back as 1884 and you can break down the maps by state, county, ethnicity, margin of victory, etc. The website is http://americanpast.richmond.edu/voting/ if you want to check it out. They are still working to expand it and add information such as immigration patterns and voting stats for women. It takes a huge amount of memory so it can be a little slow to load. It's a great resource though!
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.
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.