With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.
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Notes -
A Tuesday Morning Black Pill: What's the Margin for Error on an Election?
TLDR: Pennsylvania is the most likely deciding state for this election. In the last two elections running, both featuring Trump, the deciding margin of votes has been so small, that in any other context in which untrained people filled out a form, we would expect more than that quantity of people to fill out the form wrong. Have a nice day.
NOTE: This entire post is premised on the idea that the results are more-or-less actual results.
Greetings from the swing township of the swing county in the swing region of the swing state. What's been on my mind lately, but which I can't find anywhere: what's the rate of people filling out their ballots incorrectly? What's the error rate? Not spoiling their ballot or otherwise destroying it so that it doesn't count, but voting for the wrong person. The voting equivalent of walking to the fridge, pouring yourself a glass of milk, then putting the glass in the fridge and carrying the jug to the breakfast table. I'm looking for the people who walk in saying "I plan to vote for [A]", walk in and mistakenly fill out their ballot for [B}, then turn it in and walk out thinking "I voted for [A]!"
Most business studies and data analysis texts put the base assumed error rate on manual data entry at around 1%, though that feels like a round number bias more than a legitimate estimate. And, of course, election day is just about the worst case scenario for manual data entry! Even the best voters only fill out a ballot twice a year, more commonly it's somewhere between every two and every four, and for many voters it will be even longer. Millions of voters will be filling out this particular ballot for the first time, either because they have never voted before, or because the ballot layout has changed since they last voted. Voters will often be waiting in line for hours before they have the opportunity to vote, often at the end of the day after work. Mistakes will be made.
But it's impossible to measure under actual conditions, as it's impossible to distinguish voting by error from voting secretly (except under particularly egregious conditions, like tens of thousands of liberal Palm Beach Jews mysteriously voting for Pat Buchanan in 2000). It's totally permissible, to return to my platonic ideal scenario, to walk in wearing a "WOMEN'S RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS" T shirt and vote straight Republican once your wife isn't looking over your shoulder. America considers that not just permissible, but your right, and an important part of the system. The votes are immediately anonymized anyway.
But I've been unable to find anyone talking about plain voter error, any studies done under laboratory conditions to determine a likely percentage. Because, for the Cathedral construed most broadly, this idea is just too scary, it's too existentially dreadful: for some closeness of election, the result doesn't actually reflect anything but luck. A 1% error rate, which is the bare minimum and it is likely higher, would quite frequently swing an election as close as several swing states have been in recent elections. Our political parties have optimized us right out of democracy, the choice is so narrow that there is no real choice occurring. The result will likely reflect the will of the people only in the most tenuous sense.
Eh, people filling out their ballot wrong have it their own damn fault. I’ve no sympathy at all.
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Bush v. Gore involved over 5.8 million votes. At least 113,820 of those marked multiple candidates and thus could not be counted. That suggests a 1.95% baseline.
Here MIT corroborates the 1% number, but they don’t give their source in turn.
I can’t remember if my voting machine even allowed that sort of error. It definitely said “CHOOSE ONE OR NONE.” next to each office. Did they use checkboxes or radio buttons?
Anyway, I don’t see any reason to invoke the Cathedral. Research is rare (but not verboten) because it’s hard, not because it’s existential. After the “butterfly ballots” it was a reasonably popular topic.
I think your search results were just clouded by news stories about polling error, which is much more important to organizations trying to make their predictions.
Method varied by county, but in 2000 Florida a lot of the recount counties used punch cards. You needed to poke a hole with the stylus on a paper ballot and then they were machine counted. So it was easy to poke multiple holes or not poke all the way through. There were also overvotes where someone would punch "Gore" then write in "Gore" in the write in space.
La Griffe Du Lion had a take on the 2000 Florida ballots back in 2001, http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/elec2000.htm
Oh, no, the insanity of the "hanging chads" was much worse than that.
First, you could poke all the way through and not have the machine count it, because the chad happened to still be attached by one or two corners and could thus fold out of the way of your punch but then fold back into place to prevent the scanner from seeing a hole. In the Palm Beach County recounts they had to decide on rules about how a "Tri Chad" with only one separated corner would still count as a vote but a "Pregnant Chad" pushed out but still attached at four corners would not count.
Second, in theory you could not poke through a chad but still have it get counted, because the whole process of the recounts was that you got a bunch of partisans on all sides to manhandle a bunch of paper designed to be easily torn. You think it's bad when a printed paper ballot isn't immediately read perfectly by the scanner/tallier? Imagine if each time someone tried to scan it it got more smudged than the last...
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Right, and then a big chunk of election law was passed to make this less likely. Did it actually yield an improvement? The next few elections didn’t have any similar complaints.
People are already sowing rumors about the touch-screen-and-printer devices popular in the last few years. I didn’t have any trouble with mine; obviously, that doesn’t rule it out.
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I'm feeling some of the vibe I was trying to channel in my not-well-liked, but at least not-hated comment a couple days ago. One perspective on realizing that close elections have some randomness involved is, "HOLY SHIT THIS IS SO CLOSE EVERY LITTLE THING MATTERS I MUST REORGANIZE MY LIFE AROUND PROVIDING AN EXTRA EPSILON IN MY PREFERRED DIRECTION," while another perspective is, "Eh, if it's close enough that a little randomness can change things, the country must be mostly okay-ish with either result, so from a long-term institutional perspective, it'll probably be fine." I'm shooting for the latter, as I think it turns the temperature down a bit.
Of course, one could also think that the country is strongly divided, but I think the country could be strongly divided 60-40, and whether or not it's close enough that some randomness can change things isn't really the best indicator of dividedness (first moment vs. second moment).
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This conclusion seems to require two very specific assumptions to hold:
Election outcomes reflecting the will of 49% of the voters rather than 51% of the voters is a "most tenuous sense" of "reflecting the will".
For each voter coming in to vote, the option they intended to vote for reflects their will 100%, and the other option reflects their will 0%.
The first one is an assertion about the meaning of elections, and the second one is an assertion about the alignment between candidates and voter intent. Both of them seem sketchy to me, though I think that my objection to the second one will be the more compelling one.
For the first one, I think the underlying assumption that the majority winner, however narrow, gets the moral label of representing the will of the people and can do whatever they want is already flawed, and treating the 50% mark as magical has similar vibes to me as that often-mocked idea that by lusting after a 17-years-and-364-days-old you are a filthy pedophile, but the 18-years-and-0-days-old one? You go, boy. Democratic elections aren't some game you play where the winner gets to rule in whatever way they want up to and including "execute everyone who voted for the loser" and sportsmanship demands that the loser go along with it, but primarily a common knowledge machine for support, coupled with a power assignment mechanism that is meant to give the ones that are most likely to benefit from the common knowledge a shot at governing. This is why many systems give election losers a chance to form a government if the winners failed to get an absolute majority coalition, and why big political vibe shifts are often secured by votes of confidence or technically-unrelated polls/plebiscites that are advertised as such. ("Let it be known that a vote for Prop 1234 is a signal of continued support for me!")
The primary function of having 51% of people vote for you is that every individual knows that if they tried to start an uprising against you, about 51% of people would tend to oppose it, and everyone know that everyone knows, etc.; coupled with common-sense understanding of status quo bias even among those who did not vote for the ruler, the hope is that prospective revolutionaries know that it's not worth to try and start an abortive attempt (that would be negative-sum for the polity). The ruler, on the other hand, knows that with a 51% result their options are limited, because if they do things that might really piss off the other 49% while leaving their 51% supporters at most lukewarm, the common knowledge that a revolution is doomed will disappear.
None of these considerations change by a lot if the 49% and the 51% figure are swapped, since the genuine 51% winner already has to govern in a way that keeps the 49% somewhat happy (and thus reflect their will) under all but the most extreme assumptions of voters being emotionless optimiser-bots for completely disparate value functions and equal combat stats, so 49% don't revolt because they would lose and 51% do whatever they want because they would win. In reality, 51% motivated vs. 49% unmotivated win by about as much as 49% motivated vs. 51% unmotivated.
For the second one, why do you think it comes to pass that election after election in the US two-party system is this close? Is there some mystery biological mechanism that makes about 50% of Americans 100%-Democrat-0%-Republican and the other half 0%-Democrat-100%-Republican, like about 50% are female? Clearly the more sensible theory is that the parties are the ones that, for whatever reason, shift every election season so that about 50% of voters vote for them. You could postulate all sorts of mechanisms for why this would be the case, but the details don't particularly matter for this argument. All that matters is that parties must have the liberty to shift the margin of their votership quite freely, and this implies that the marginal, for example, Democrat voter can't plausibly be one whose will is actually 0% represented by the Republican option, because otherwise how could the Republican party slightly tweak their platform/message and turn that voter into a Republican voter? Instead, there must evidently be a band of voters along the middle who, in a given election, are just slightly more in favour of one party than the other, and considering the stability of the approx. 50-50 split, this band is surely wider than 1%. For these voters, if the other party wins, their overall political will is maybe reflected by 49%; but also, if the party they voted for won, their will would only be reflected by 51% or so, because they were equally marginal pickings for their own party as it shifted its platform to "ride the margin"!
In short, for a number of people well in excess of 1%, the election outcome being flipped by 1% worth of noise is not the cataclysmic event of "their will being reflected in the most tenuous sense", but the fairly mundane event of their will being reflected a tiny bit less than otherwise. The only ones for whom this event is cataclysmic are those deeply aligned with one or the other party, the actual near-100% D/Rs (who I'm sure are overrepresented here), but why are they specifically entitled to have their will reflected to any significant degree?
On top of everything, if the wrong votes bother you, why aren't you bothered by the non-voters? What percentage of those actually reflect a will to not vote, as opposed to people who fully intended to vote for one party or another but couldn't, be it because their car broke down on the day, their employer didn't give them a day off, they overslept, their postal vote got lost or whatever? What percentage of people who did vote did so because they were idle on the day and found themselves near a polling station and thought "hell, why not" without having any opinion on the election? (Happened to me once!)
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It doesn’t make sense to look at and functions better as part of a more broad “error rate” (somewhat organic inherent noise). First of all in aggregate an error like this is typically symmetric, ie does not “bias” results. Second, on a basic level it’s like asking how many people fill out their gender wrong to what they intended? I’m imagining quite low. I honestly don’t think it’s ever happened to me at least. But if you want to ask the related question about how many people mistake one name for another, well then you’re taking about name ID, which is studied, and better treated as its own thing. Or if you look at bias towards the first name appearing on the ballot, again that is studied and is its own thing.
Edit: However I should add that a pretty close analogue is the debate about whether an online poll should or should not provide a “back” button. I don’t have any literature on hand, but some say a back button can provide greater accuracy, but IIRC most people use the back button to rethink an answer as opposed to fixing an error, although one potential trade off is that this can lead to more bias (some claim and I agree) because “motivation” to click the back button can vary, potentially/in theory, by response. But most post election polls are not this type anyways and pollsters are more worried about deliberate lies to pollsters because they are inherently biased in a statistic sense (again are plausibly non symmetric)
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This is, of course, leaving aside things like voters who just don't get the joke.
Puerto Ricans in PA, apparently offended by the "floating Island of Trash" comment, interpreted Trump's use of garbage trucks in his rallies as doubling down on the comment calling them trash. Being unaware of the interplay of Biden saying "no, you're the trash!" to the MAGA base, which Trump was then slur-reclaiming by using garbage trucks, voters simply took it as:
That's some great median voter energy right there.
Voters aren't obliged to get the joke. In so far as the punching up/punching down framework is helpful, a platform speaker at a Presidential campaign rally attacking a group of voters is always punching down and always fucking up.
Trump hired an edgy comedian to introduce his rally. Said comedian insulted Puerto Ricans. Biden (probably misspeaking) turned the insult around on Trump supporters. Trump decided to treat this as the worst thing ever. Doubling down on a row when both parties screwed up and were rude, but your side was racist as well, is stupid.
This is a personal crusade far removed from the much more important topic of the election, but it isn't. It has never been, and it probably never will be. The person who introduced it is a cartoonist who has never made anyone laugh in his entire life, and it hasn't been endorsed by anyone who's actually funny (except maybe Bo Burnham, I don't know that he has, but he might've).
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