Very good. Thanks for posting it.
Ping!
Interesting point - what if the “fired” acorn workers are now doing the phone polling?
The moral of the story is:
Don’t listen to the media or the polls.
In the immortal words of Yogi Berra:
It gets late early around here...but it ain’t over til it’s over!
VOTE. No matter what you VOTE.
I answered the whole thing as a rabid socialist.
yitbos
The chances of a given state falling outside the MOE = 1/20 =.05. The calculation for the probability that 16 out of 57 states would fall outside the MOE is a simple one which uses the BINOMIAL DISTRIBUTION FUNCTION:
The Probability (P) that at least 16 out of 57 states would deviate beyond the exit poll MOE is:
P = 1-BINOMDIST(16,57,0.05,TRUE)
This returns P= 0.0000000218559% or 1 out of 4,575,415,347!
Therefore, McCain will win - so there!
Brilliantly said! This is precisely why I have been increasingly frustrated with the endless panicked posting and re-posting of the commercial political poll results on FR as they are incomplete without the MoE, and utterly meaningless and irrelevant because of the non-gaussian sample abberations summarized in the bullet points at the end of this piece.
Forget about polls. Ignore them, realize they are pure propaganda that may as well be based on Tarot cards or the reading of entrails! Just Get Out the Vote!
I heart Iowahawk.
I think there is an error in the sampling within the population too that isn’t accounted for.
Since the sampling of any sub-group would introduce the same amount of error within the sub-group.
The error rate for the entire poll is only accurate if you assume the sampling rates of the sub-groups are correct.
bump
Ping.