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How accurate are elections?
Thursday - October 16, 2008 02:10 PM in
by Peter Leppik
We're going into the home stretch of the 2008 election. I will be glad to have this over with: it's been almost two years since Obama ad McCain started campaigning, and with the financial crisis we've clearly reached a point where we need to choose a new leader in order to roll up our sleeves and get to working fixing our problems.
Elections are a process of choosing our leaders, and the current political philosophy is that the election should be as open and large as possible in order to reflect the will of the people as accurately as possible. This wasn't always the case: when this country was founded entire demographic groups were deliberately excluded from voting (women, slaves, etc.) on the theory that not everyone is "qualified" to help choose the President, congressman, mayor, or dogcatcher.
But how accurate are elections at reflecting the "will of the people"? I don't know the answer to that question (though maybe someone working for a political polling organization does), but it's obvious that elections suffer from several problems which can cause the outcome to differ from what it would be if you could poll everyone theoretically eligible to vote:
- Self-selection: citizens choose whether or not to vote, and there's no attempt to correct for the relative opinions between those people more and less interested in voting.
- Demographic bias: many demographic factors strongly affect which candidate someone is likely to vote for (age, income, gender, race, and many others), and voting rates are dramatically different among different demographic votes.
- Order bias: on most ballots, candidates are listed in the same order on every ballot, rather than randomizing the order to correct for precendence and recency bias.
The irony is that political pollsters, in order to accurately predict the outcome of an election, have to correct their survey process in order to replicate the inherent biases of the election itself. In many ways it's easier to construct a survey which accurately reflects the opinions of the population as a whole than to figure out all the ways in which an election will differ from an across-the-board opinion survey.
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