Archive for majority rule

it figures [the return]

Posted in Kids, pictures, Statistics with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 23, 2024 by xi'an


An article in The Guardian on 03 December pointed out the fallacy of reporting landslides and massive victory of Donald Trump

  • he did not win the majority of the votes, albeit getting more popular votes than Kamala Harris
  • his margin of victory is a mere 1.6 percent
  • the 312 votes in the electoral college are par both Trump’s result in 2016 (304) and Biden’s in 2020 (306)
  • he won the blue wall states by 231,000 votes total, hence would have lost had only 116,000 voters (0.7% of the votes) switched.

While Nate Cohn of The New York Times reflected on the poll strengths and misses, since

  • polls predicted shifts in several voting groups towards Trump
  • they underestimated him by about two percentage points, which is the average poll error along years
  • and they did not do well at predicting turnout in Democratic districts

Le Monde puzzle [open problem]

Posted in Books, Kids with tags , , , , , on October 23, 2017 by xi'an

What should have been the last puzzle in Le Monde competition turned out to be an anticlimactic fizzle on how many yes-no questions are needed to identify an integer between 1 and 1025=2¹⁰+1 and an extension to replies possibly being lies…

What is much more exciting is that voting puzzle #1021 got cancelled because the authors of this puzzle thought the cascading majority rule would produce the optimal solution and it does not! (As exhibited by my R code.) So here is an open problem to ponder about! (And another puzzle in the pipeline to complete the competition.)