As a die-hard political junkie, I’ve been looking for something to
fill the void left by an abnormally tidy presidential race. Luckily I
live in Minnesota, and get minute-by-minute updates about the Great
Minnesota Recount. Projecting the winner for the recount is difficult:
Were challenged ballots type I errors or type II errors? Exactly how
many challenged ballots were withdrawn by each candidate? And would Al
Franken or Norm Coleman be a better representative of the political
views of The
Lizard People.
The Star Tribune has enabled readers to vote on the outcomes for challenged ballots. I
assumed that the reader votes were for entertainment purposes, but the
Star Tribune has cleverly analyzed two million reader votes to project the final outcomes for over 6,000
challenged ballots.
It is easy to imagine that these online votes are biased. Online
users trend democratic, and Democrats may award more ballots to
Franken. However, some anecdotal evidence hints that the Star
Tribune’s projections beat those from political experts. During the
past two days, the Strib’s projection has hovered around a 75 vote lead
for Franken. Meanwhile, projections from Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, a
highly respected voting analyst, have slowly been converging to the
Strib’s.
Maybe if we had crowdsourced the original counting of the ballots we wouldn’t be in this mess!
