Slashdot is hosting a story on some brilliant work done by Mike Sheppard (a graduate student in statistics in Michigan). Using some pretty simple math, Mike shows just how close the last two elections were. His analysis can be found here. In short he observed:
"There have been 12 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 entire election would have been different."
The last two elections were in this group. According to his analysis, in the 2000 election, had less than 300 voters had a change of heart, the outcome would have been different. From a probabilistic standpoint, the Bush victory in 2000 practically happened by chance.
Now, I bring this up for two reasons. First, as you'll see in future posts, I've been examining how the electoral college system biases our political structure so that the religious right has a greater influence on a national level than their demographic size. Second, since many of the social issues haven't changed, this clearly demonstrates the importance of getting out every single vote in this modern political environment.
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