The Election Industry
Let's Know Things
Colin Wright
4.8 • 593 Ratings
🗓️ 17 December 2019
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week we talk about polling, the voting machine industry, and election hacking.
We also discuss oligopolies, confidence intervals, and the Reverse Bradley Effect.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | An opinion poll is a sociological exercise that attempts to extract representative opinions from a sample of the relevant population. |
| 0:23.6 | What that means in practice is that you ask a group of people questions in order to understand |
| 0:28.2 | what they believe about something, and that group is meant to be proportionate to the larger |
| 0:32.9 | group you're trying to assess. So if you wanted to understand what a particular demographic, let's say |
| 0:38.6 | American teenagers, think about a new product, you would get a group of American teenagers with the |
| 0:43.6 | right ratio of different backgrounds, cultures, tastes, ages, and ask them a series of questions |
| 0:49.1 | in an attempt to uncover useful data, ranging from whether or not they like a particular thing to whether |
| 0:55.7 | they'll buy it, at what price, why they do or do not like it, and so on. |
| 1:00.6 | Scaled up to the size of a country, opinion polls are often used in the political world |
| 1:05.1 | to predict voter turnout and who those voters will vote for. As with product-market analysis, political pollsters identify a representative sampling, |
| 1:15.4 | a group of people who are raciotically representative of the racial and economic and educational |
| 1:21.2 | and gender identity background of a voting population, and ask them questions about their |
| 1:26.6 | intended future actions. |
| 1:28.6 | Will they be voting in the upcoming election? Who for? Will they be going straight ticket or |
| 1:33.0 | voting for people of various parties? What policies do they support? What news items make them |
| 1:38.4 | worry about their choice? What do they think about the leading candidate from the other side? |
| 1:43.8 | The theory is that if you can understand what this smaller but ostensibly |
| 1:47.6 | depictive group thinks about something, you can then scale those findings up and have a pretty |
| 1:52.8 | good idea within a semi-reliable confidence range, let's say with 5% uncertainty, who will win |
| 1:59.7 | an election, and who will lose, and often by how much, |
| 2:03.4 | which groups will have changed their favored party since the last election, which demographics |
| 2:08.2 | came out most strongly overall, and which came out most strongly for a given candidate, |
... |
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