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Mathematics Says Romney and Santorum Tied In Iowa
Hugh Pickens writes "Presidential candidate Mitt Romney received eight more votes than candidate Rick Santorum or 0.007 percent of the total number of caucus votes in the Iowa caucus, 'eking out a victory' on the path to winning the Republican nomination for president but experts in statistics say Romney and Santorum actually tied. 'From a statistical point of view, you can't say Romney won any more than you can say Santorum won,' says Charles Seife, a professor of journalism at New York University who studies election error. That's because in the Iowa caucus, where voters marked their choices with check marks or by writing the candidates' names in by hand, the error rate in counting the votes, which is also done by hand is orders of magnitude above the victory margin — around 0.5 to 1 percent. There are several sources of error that could easily render eight votes meaningless." (Read on for more.)
Hugh Pickens continues: "First, ballots sometimes stick to the bottom of ballot boxes when the boxes are overturned, and fail to be counted. Next, election officials occasionally misread messy handwriting, or tally their totals incorrectly. Finally officials can misjudge who a voter intended to vote for: 'You'd be surprised how often people place a check mark in an ambiguous place,' says Seife. Whether it's statistically significant or not, any official declaration of victory can have big ramifications. With political pundits regarding Romney's 'victory' as evidence that he's in a good position to win the Republican nomination, the failure to recognize a statistical tie in Iowa could impact the future of the country. 'It's Romney, not Santorum, who can head to New Hampshire claiming the win,' writes Nick Rizzo. 'But if you just counted the exact same votes all over again, there's a good chance the result would be different.'"
Let the Supreme Court decide.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Mitt the anti Christ or Mr Frothy Santorum? This is a choice?
* Carthago Delenda Est *
The world is round, p <= .05.
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
It's a non binding vote. A straw poll. It's already totally and completely meaningless.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
All the republicans candidates look much the same to me, except Ron Paul. They seem to be all playing it safe, avoiding saying anything too out-of-the-mainstream at such a critical time.
Seriously, it's Iowa, the only thing this one's good for is showing who definitely should not run, and even that's questionable.
They really should run all the caucuses in just a few days. There's no good reason, other than lots of opportunities to bribe, err, donate to your favorite candidate, that these should run more than a day or two for all 50 states. But, that would go against the political machine and those that keep it greased purposes.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Even recognizing the certainty of there being some error, that Romney has 8 more votes means he is more likely to have been the true winner if that error were eliminated. Assuming the error is equally likely to benefit Romney as it is to benefit Santorum. That suggests something other than "a tie" to me. The most accurate thing might be to say, "We don't know whether Romney or Santorum won, but it's slightly more likely that Romney did."
The only thing that matters is the number of delegates the canidates won. Romney, Santorum and Paul each won 7 delegates. Gingrich and Perry each won 2 delegates. Currently Romney has the most delegates because he has support from delegates not tied to elections. Romney has 18, Santorum has 8, Paul has 7 delegates total.
Because the results are not binding anyway, there's no need for a recount, or so the NYTimes says:
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/04/no-need-for-recount-in-iowa-caucus/?scp=1&sq=iowa%20recount&st=cse
It's because the caucus votes don't really count. There's two layers of delegates between the voters and the people who vote who actually count. By the end the delegate voters generally vote for whoever is "clearly" going to win the nomination in the national races. The vote that occurred recently in Iowa is just for the media.
Also, this year there is a proportional assignment of delegates based on the percent of vote received. Iowa has a total of 26 delegates, and 1,144 are needed to win the party nomination. At 1/26, there can be as much as 4% error in the vote and it shouldn't affect the delegate ratios.
CNN lists the following delegate votes:
What candidates hope to get out of Iowa, mainly, seems to be being able to say they won an election, or did way better than expected (e.g. Santorum), essentially in the hopes that it will persuade primary voters in other early primary states (NH, SC, FL, etc) to jump on the bandwagon and vote for them.
Which is sad. If you're just going to vote for the candidate everyone else is voting for, why bother voting at all, especially in a primary? Primaries should be all about voting for your *favorite* candidate, not the guy you think might win if you can just push him over the top.
Well, it's good to pound into the heads of some of the trailing candidates that they have no chance in the election and should save their money and go home.
That this news put Mr. Santorum's followers in quite a froth.
You're not really contradicting what the guy said. It's not as if Obama has strayed at all from his predecessor's policies on war, executive supremacy, and foreign policy.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
It comes from people who figured out that democracy isn't all roses and rainbows...
This reminds me of an interview with a common man from a recent "Arab Spring" nation I heard on the radio. He was asked about an upcoming election. The translation: "How can this be democracy? There is no one who represents me!"
Welcome to the club buddy.
Bachman got the message, at least. So that's one good outcome of an otherwise meaningless process.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Right, the votes don't tell you which of them won. But that's different than a tie, which says they got the same number of votes.
The votes just haven't been counted carefully enough to know who won. But it's almost certainly not a tie.
The journalism prof said "Scientists know that when you can't tell the difference between the two things, they say that, as best they can tell, these are the same size." Which just goes to show that he doesn't understand statistics very well. The correct interpretation of the result is that you can't prove there's a difference between the two. That's a weaker conclusion than concluding that they are equal.
Obama got the Arab League* to endorse the no-fly zone over Libya, and got the Europeans flying many of the missions, for a final cost of about $2 billion and no known American lives. Does that sound even remotely like either of Bush's wars?
* Which, mind you, is not only Arab and Muslim like Libya, but also mostly dealing with internal dissent themselves, and are obviously wary of Western intervention themselves. How eager do you suppose they were to throw Libya under the bus?
My favorite was "Santorum Surges From Behind in Iowa".