Math Forum Discussions

David Einstein

Posts: 389
Registered: 12/6/04

Re: Electoral college probablities
Posted: Oct 30, 2000 5:29 PM

Plain Text

I believe that the point was to do some interesting
mathematics, and possibly illuminate the mechanisms that drive the
difference between the popular and electoral votes. One could
certainly make a computer model that reflects the different electoral
weights and voting tendencies of each of the states if one wanted to
understand the outcome of the current election, but if one was interested
in the effect of using electors one could do worse than starting from
the simplest possible model and adding confounding factors one at a time.
It seems intuitive that the 'popular vote' and 'electoral
vote' will be positively correlated. Assuming that all the 'states'
have an equal 'electoral vote' and IID 'popular vote' with a mean of
50% how weak can the correlation be?

William L. Bahn (wbahn@uswest.net) wrote:
: What's the point? You are taking something that is quite complex and
: creating a simpler model in order to make the computations easier. Fine.
: But, you can only take that so far. The more extreme your simplifications
: the less your model applies to the situation you are trying to model. The
: key is to balance loss of accuracy and applicability against mathematical
: tractability. However, your "simplifying assumptions" are so out of touch
: with reality that any conclusions you come to are meaningless. In fact, they
: are worse than meaningless because, like on-line polls and surveys, they
: actually subtract from the knowledge base. People see the result and
: implicitly, if not explicitly, apply it to the actual case and they THINK
: they have knowledge that they simply do not have - hence they have
: effectively been given negative information ("negative" as in
: "less-than-zero")

I suspect that Peter was much more interested in generating
meaningful mathematics than illuminating the current US political
quagmire.