What Is the Probability Your Vote Will Make a Difference?
نویسندگان
چکیده
One of the motivations for voting is that one vote can make a difference. In a presidential election, the probability that your vote is decisive is equal to the probability that your state is necessary for an electoral college win, times the probability the vote in your state is tied in that event. We computed these probabilities a week before the 2008 presidential election, using state-by-state election forecasts based on the latest polls. The states where a single vote was most likely to matter are New Mexico, Virginia, New Hampshire, and Colorado, where your vote had an approximate 1 in 10 million chance of determining the national election outcome. On average, a voter in America had a 1 in 60 million chance of being decisive in the presidential election. (JEL H0)
منابع مشابه
مدیر موفق کیست؟
Who is a really successful manager? A manager who spends less money, or the one who earns more? A manager who can survive for a longer period of time, or an administrator who expands his organization, and opens up new branches? Which one is the most successful? The article tries to answer these questions and provides, some simple guidlines for the managers in every domain of management who wan...
متن کاملVoter, What Message Will Motivate You to Verify Your Vote?
There is increasing interest in verifiable Internet voting systems that enable voters to verify the integrity of their vote on the voting platform prior to casting it, and any interested party to verify the integrity of the election results. The ease with which a vote can be verified plays a key role. Empowering individual voters to act as interested yet objective verifiers increases the probab...
متن کاملEstimating the Probability of Events That Have Never Occurred: When Is Your Vote Decisive?
Researchers sometimes argue that statisticians have little to contribute when few realizations of the process being estimated are observed. We show that this argument is incorrect even in the extreme situation of estimating the probabilities of events so rare that they have never occurred. We show how statistical forecasting models allow us to use empirical data to improve inferences about the ...
متن کاملReflections on Jennifer Saul's View of Successful Communication and Conversational Implicature
Saul (2002) criticizes a view on the relationship between speaker meaning and conversational implicatures according to which speaker meaning is exhaustively comprised of what is said and what is implicated. In the course of making her points, she develops a couple of new notions which she calls “utterer-implicature” and “audience-implicature”. She then makes certain claims about the relationshi...
متن کاملJoint action can make a difference: Measures of voting power generalized
The political influence that a voter has under a specific decision rule is often measured in terms of the probability that that voter’s vote is critical. If it is calculated on the basis of the Bernoulli model, the popular Banzhaf measure of (a priori) voting power is obtained. But the probability of being critical can also be calculated for alternative probability models. If they are constrain...
متن کامل