Poll UpdatesI’ll be coming to San Francisco next Tuesday for TEDxSF, a spinoff of the famous TED conference. It’s at the California Academy of Sciences. Mayor Gavin Newsom will launch the event. The event will be LiveStreamed – tune in around 4:00pm Pacific. I’m on a little after 4:30pm to talk about the neuroscience of willpower.
Other speakers on the docket: cellist Zoë Keating, planetarium guru Ryan Wyatt, and many more. Check it out at www.TEDxSF.org.
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Back on the false-belief beat…sort of. I’ve previously written about false belief formation from the standpoint of neuroscience. A prominent category these days is the delusion, mostly on the right, that President Obama is thought to be hiding something really big. These days it’s his citizenship: “birthers” claim that he is not a Hawaii-born US citizen eligible for the presidency (never mind the 1961 newspaper announcements and this thorough debunking).
Lead Birther Orly Taitz, a self-taught lawyer, dentist, and real estate agent, has been filing federal lawsuits to remove President Obama from office. She finally has a court date…for driving at amazingly reckless speeds. (see also the Orange County courts, traffic case 14852LC)
Christie (R) won by 4.2%, substantially more than the 1.0% I predicted. On the other hand, Corzine (D) received 44.6% of the vote, quite close to the 44.5% VM-optimized polling average. Looks like it might be Daggett (I) supporters reclaiming the power of their vote.
Was I wrong about NY-23? Only two polls were available. They came before the full impact of Scozzafava (R)’s last-minute endorsement of Owens (D), which evidently worked. It’s a squeaker. Owens won by 4%. This is a lose-lose for Republicans: loss of the seat is a self-inflicted injury by the party’s unreconstructed right-wingers. Full results are here.
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The polls in the Corzine (D) – Christie (R) – Daggett (I) race have been very close. So it’s time for the variance minimization tool that I advocated at the end of the 2008 Presidential race. Using that, I come up with the following conclusions:
Since 10/23 (i.e. the last 10 days), the race has been static. Polls spanning that entire period give
Final margin: Christie over Corzine by 1.0+/-1.0% (68% CI, 16 polls).
3-way outcome: Christie 45.5%, Corzine 44.5%, Daggett 10.0%.
Christie win probability: 83%, i.e. 5:1 odds.
More details, and analysis of the NY-23 race, after the break. [Read more →]
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Last year I recommended a donation strategy that nearly 400 of you followed to give nearly $45,000 to one side (and an unknown amount to the other side). Now that Al Franken is finally on his way to being Minnesota’s junior senator (by 312 votes, a 0.01% margin), was it a good strategy? [Read more →]
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Here’s the latest update from Walter Mebane of U. Michigan. At this point he is quite confident that fraud occurred. He has kindly made data and R scripts available for the curious.
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Iran’s Guardian Council has admitted that apparent turnout exceeded 100% in at least 50 cities. This confirms recent analysis at the University of St. Andrews as well as by David Shor.
Inflated voting is the crudest of fraud, cruder than anything implied by my previous post. At this point statistical analysis is interesting for filling in details and estimating the extent of the fraud.
In other news, Boud Roukema has now reported three of the six most populous voting areas in his analysis have vote totals for Karroubi that start with 7, the anomaly he reported before. All three of these have greater proportions of votes for Ahmadenijad than the other three voting areas.
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Current events have completely overwhelmed the relevance of any statistical analysis. But a critical look can still point us toward a better understanding of what happened on Election Day.
Analysis of fraud in Iran 2009 is an unfolding story. In this post I focus on Election Day returns themselves, which suggest: Votes may have been, in some sense, transferred from the minor candidates (Karroubi and Rezaee) to one of the major candidates. This could have been legitimate (that is, voters changing their minds when it came time to vote) or illegitimate (for example, minor-candidate votes being counted for Ahmadinejad). It is currently not known whether enough fraud occurred to flip the election.
Obviously, fraud is not necessarily confined to that suggested by this analysis. For summaries and updates, see David Shor and Fivethirtyeight.com (start with basic returns and poll analysis). [Read more →]
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On June 2-8, one-on-one debates were held between pairs of major candidates. As I posted earlier, these could have shifted opinion. One reader writes:
People watched all of the debates very carefully and the result was actually very bad for AhmadiNejad…[I] am saying that as an Iranian based on what I saw and heard from people during and after the debates. Rezaei did very well in the debates and got popularity (if not votes) specially for his debate with AhmadiNejad.
I wonder if undecideds felt this way.
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Updated with a third possible reason for the discrepancy. -Sam
At a minimum, hundreds of statistically minded people are poring over Iranian election data (see my previous post and these posts). Sorry for my slow start…but let’s roll.
Three general categories of data are currently available for validating the Iranian election: (1) pre-election polls, (2) statistical methods for analyzing standalone voting data, and (3) statistical comparisons with past elections. Categories (2) and (3) are out on the web already, and I’ll comment soon on those efforts.
First, let’s look at some polls. A simple look at pre-election polls leads to the following assessment: National Iranian polls were highly variable and of suspect quality. But within Tehran, polls were more uniform and allow a comparison. Six Tehran polls gave a median lead for Moussavi by 4%. This differs notably from the official tally for the city, Ahmadinejad by 12%. The 16-point discrepancy suggests an anomaly in Tehran and opens the question of whether fraud occurred here – and elsewhere. However, it is also important to note several caveats, including polling uncertainty and possible shifts in opinion following the Ahmadinejad-Moussavi debate on June 3rd.
More after the jump. [Read more →]
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Andrew says there was “a routing problem this morning between the University and quite a few outside websites — a split in the internet, if you will.” For the next EV estimator update, check back at noon…
Biden v. Palin drew 70 million viewers, one-third more than Obama v. McCain. VP debates usually don’t matter, but I wondered… Read more »
Tomorrow (Friday) at noon, I’ll give a talk in Kosuke Imai and Dustin Tingley’s political methodology seminar. If you’re nearby, you’re welcome to attend. Of course, the math will all be included. The blurb is here (PDF).
Update: Here’s another local event, happening next Tuesday: a panel on the reliability of state polls featuring both pollsters and academics, including Andrew Gelman, author of Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State. I hear the panel will be webcast. If so I’ll post a link.
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