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Perfect Coin-Toss Record Broke 6 Clinton-Sanders Deadlocks In Iowa (marketwatch.com)
schwit1 writes: While it was hard to call a winner between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders last night, it's easy to say who was luckier. The race between the Democrat presidential hopefuls was so tight in the Iowa caucus Monday that in at least six precincts, the decision on awarding a county delegate came down to a coin toss. And Clinton won all six, media reports said.
NEVER say those last three words again!
Actually, one in 32 odds. The chance that a coin tossed one time lands with the same face up is 1 in 1. The chance that a coin tossed two times lands with the same face up is 1 in 2, etc.
A little over two standard deviations.
However, as Washington Post notes, "see the update below: there were other tosses which Sanders won."
The update states:
Update: The initial 6-for-6 report, from the Des Moines Register missed a few Sanders coin-toss wins. (There were a lot of coin tosses!) The ratio of Clinton to Sanders wins was closer to 50-50, which is what we'd expect.
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Posting this here so it gets more views.
The story is wrong. There were many more coin flips than just the 6 reported and Sanders won his fair share of them. The coin flips are a result of precincts that have an odd number of delegates to the Iowa State Democratic Convention. Say the precinct has 5 delegates and the vote between Clinton and Sanders was a tie. The precinct then sends 2 delegates for Clinton and 2 delegates for Sanders and the 5th delegate is decided by the coin flip. IIRC from the story I heard on NPR there are something like 11,000 delegates to the Iowa State Democratic Convention and it is at that convention where the actual delegates to the Democratic National Convention are selected. So with 11,000 delegates to the state convention the results of a few coin flips aren't going to change much.