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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
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
I'm turning 41 in a week, and this is the 2nd election I listened to...even in 2000, while I 'listened' enough to make up my mind, I didn't think politics was really important. Even the Florida recount didn't seem to matter that much to me, I figured "how much more then the other one can one of these bozos screw things up?" After 9/11 and the other insane government fuckups of the first Bush administration, I got more involved. I figured there'd be no way 2004 would re-elect Bush, so I didn't donate too much or work too hard. Sure Kerry was wooden, but after the first debate my vote changed from "Anyone but Bush" to "Kerry, the guy who could articulate an intelligent position" (even if he could ramble on for days :)
Now in 2008 I'm working in a local campaign, donating money to Obama and Al Franken.
For an interesting picture about how much having the wrong guy at the top matters, read 'State of Denial'.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
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.
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
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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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 !
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.
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']
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."
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.
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!
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
I liked Ron Paul's views on the economy and his foreign policy, unfortunately he is also a misogynist, homophobe, and a religious nut.
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.
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.
"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
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.