Sunday 27 November 2016

Losers who won't lose

Statistical Ideas



President-elect Trump won 306 electoral votes versus Hillary Clinton's 232 (24% less electoral votes).  Similar to 2000, the surrendering party then reversed course and put the nation through a recount, just for the sake of it.  What are the odds that such an exercise here would yield successful for Ms. Clinton?  Based on statistical randomness of re-assessing voter intent, the chance of Hillary emerging as the victor is far less than 10%.  Anything could happen, but these lean odds do not rise to the level of putting our peaceful democracy into the hands of a temptuous recount scheme every time a stung party loses (let alone misleadingly blame it on something else from Russia's Putin, to sexism, to FBI Director Comey, to "in hindsight the popular vote would be reasonable").  All Americans should instead focus on how the 6 states that flipped this election, were all economically ignored and all flipped to Donald Trump.  The only viable path for a Hillary Clinton victory at this stage is to astoundingly uncover a wide-spread (across three states) fraud.  And that's equally unlikely, since the basis for the voting aberrations occurred in less populated counties and anyway the three states employ three different voting mechanisms, so the fraud would have had to somehow jointly occur through different transmission vehicles (paper voting, and electronic voting) and we would require a speedy judicial resolution for states such as Pennsylvania that sidestepped back-up recordings from their direct voting equipment.



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