How inaccurate do you think national popular vote totals are?
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  Presidential Elections - Analysis and Discussion
  Presidential Election Process (Moderator: muon2)
  How inaccurate do you think national popular vote totals are?
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Author Topic: How inaccurate do you think national popular vote totals are?  (Read 3219 times)
ShamDam
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« on: May 27, 2016, 02:31:04 PM »

Looking at the Wikipedia page for the 2012 election, I was thinking about Barack Obama receiving 65,915,796 votes, and thought to myself "there's no way that number is precisely right." Human error across the country, and just the nature of randomness, surely means that the number cannot be accurate to the vote. Misplaced ballots, misidentified ballots, faulty precinct practices, stuff like that has to go wrong across the country on some scale.

So the question is, how inaccurate are they? Has any research been done on this? I think one benefit of the electoral college is that it prevents these things from really mattering. If we did elect Presidents via a national popular vote, and an election was super close, I think a nationwide recount would be bonkers.

I feel like it's kind of a weird question, but have at it if you have thoughts on the matter.
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LLR
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« Reply #1 on: May 27, 2016, 02:46:20 PM »

Human error up and human error down would quite likely cancel each other out for the most part, leading to error within no more than about 100,000, I'd say. I could be very wrong, though.
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muon2
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« Reply #2 on: May 28, 2016, 03:50:38 PM »

There are statistical fluctuations even with expert election judges. This post about the 2008 MN Sen recount goes into more detail.

Why not count every state every time several times then? It was very stupid to do.

There were actual issues that justified a recount. In that given case, I can't see how anyone wouldn't want to know who actually got x amount of votes, and this election was what first got me thinking about politics, even if it did take many years to become a significant interest.

Just couldn't understand how they could halt a recount in a very close election where there were obvious issues during voting. It's not like we were electing a city council member. This was for POTUS damn it.

Depends on however that State resolves ties.  I think most would make it be a matter of random chance, but frankly I doubt any tie after the initial result of a statewide election would still be a tie after a recount.

I agree, and the 2008 MN Sen race is a good example of the amount of swing that might be expected. MN has very good audit procedures for their elections, but even so there can be ballots in dispute. The initial count was Coleman leading Franken by 215 votes out of 2,885,555 cast. After the recount Franken led by 225 votes out of 2,887,337 cast. After the final court challenge the margin favored Franken by 312 votes out of 2,887,646 cast.

There are two factors to consider here. First is the change in the ballots cast. MN ended up with and additional 2091 ballots found to be valid. Missing votes and unreported or partial precincts can happen just due to human or technical errors. In this case it resulted in an additional 0.072% ballots cast which make up less than one in a thousand. However, when the margin is also less than one in a thousand, that matters.

The second is that the recovered ballots are unlikely to exactly mirror the statewide vote. That was true in MN where Franken gained 1,254 votes and Coleman gained 727. Statistical fluctuations can seem large because the added ballots are not uniformly distributed across the state. So in the case of a tie, it's very likely that a recount will find more valid votes, and it is highly unlikely that they will split exactly evenly when those added ballots total in the hundreds or thousands as they would for presidential electors.

Statistically this is not an exact number that can be known in any vote system. There will always be inconsistencies that can't be eliminated - think of voting as polling with a very small margin of error.

What makes my example above interesting is that MN requires an election audit every cycle and it involves a recount of a large number of precincts around the state by a group of experts. Many of those same experts were involved in the Franken recount, so it was possible to compare the same recounted precincts by two different trained experts. The audit results were mostly the same but there were slight differences, enough that the expected margin of error measuring the total statewide vote was greater than the swing from the recount. The race was a statistical tie, and another recount from scratch could just as likely to swing the race back as to keep the official recount result. The effect of the court picking the count that it did was effectively a coin flip from a statistician's viewpoint.
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catographer
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« Reply #3 on: July 19, 2016, 03:02:09 AM »

Countries all over the world, including every single state in the union, directly elect presidents/governors on a nationwide/statewide basis. Why wouldn't it work here?
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Kingpoleon
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« Reply #4 on: July 19, 2016, 10:21:58 PM »

In 1960, isn't there at least a little suspicion on Chicago votes and in Texas?
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Nym90
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« Reply #5 on: July 20, 2016, 12:04:36 PM »

In 1960 it really comes down to how you count the Democratic vote in Alabama. Voters didn't have the seperate options available to vote for Kennedy or Democratic unpledged electors like they did in Mississippi....the Democratic ticket had 6 unpledged electors and 5 Kennedy electors. So should the Democratic votes all be attributed to Kennedy (in which case Kennedy wins the national popular vote) or should only 5/11 of them count for Kennedy (in which case Nixon wins the national popular vote)?

There is no clear answer to this question as it is impossible to divine the intent of those voters regarding whether they intended to vote for Kennedy and/or "unpledged Democratic electors".
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Figueira
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« Reply #6 on: September 01, 2016, 03:45:08 PM »

The most populous country that elects its Presidents by pure popular vote appears to be Indonesia, although there haven't ever been any particularly close elections there.

A national recount would be rough, but I think it's still preferable to simply ignoring the will of a lot of voters.
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TrumpCard
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« Reply #7 on: September 02, 2016, 08:29:36 AM »

I'm not too worried about it and we have the Electoral College to ensure the popular vote is magnified in most cases.
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zorkpolitics
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« Reply #8 on: December 01, 2016, 01:30:45 AM »

I'm not too worried about it and we have the Electoral College to ensure the popular vote is magnified in most cases.
Or not, as Clinton lost and leads Trump by 2.5 million...
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Shameless Lefty Hack
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« Reply #9 on: December 02, 2016, 04:04:21 AM »

In 1960, isn't there at least a little suspicion on Chicago votes and in Texas?

As far as I'm aware, Robert Caro went so far as to explicitly state that the same votes that LBJ bought to be elected to the Senate in 1948 were bought for JFK in 1960.

And of course Chicago in the 20th Century wasn't exactly a pillar of democracy.
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Figueira
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« Reply #10 on: December 03, 2016, 05:24:21 PM »

I'm not too worried about it and we have the Electoral College to ensure the popular vote is magnified in most cases.
Or not, as Clinton lost and leads Trump by 2.5 million...

Prior to 2016 it was common to claim that 2000 was a freak occurence and we can always count on the electoral college to follow the popular vote. Now that's obviously not the case.
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