As a die-hard political junkie, I've been looking for something to fill the void left by an abnormally tidy presidential race. Luckily I live in Minnesota, and get minute-by-minute updates about the Great Minnesota Recount. Projecting the winner for the recount is difficult: Were challenged ballots type I errors or type II errors? Exactly how many challenged ballots were withdrawn by each candidate? And would Al Franken or Norm Coleman be a better representative of the political views of The Lizard People.
The Star Tribune has enabled readers to vote on the outcomes for challenged ballots. I assumed that the reader votes were for entertainment purposes, but the Star Tribune has cleverly analyzed two million reader votes to project the final outcomes for over 6,000 challenged ballots.
It is easy to imagine that these online votes are biased. Online users trend democratic, and Democrats may award more ballots to Franken. However, some anecdotal evidence hints that the Star Tribune's projections beat those from political experts. During the past two days, the Strib's projection has hovered around a 75 vote lead for Franken. Meanwhile, projections from Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, a highly respected voting analyst, have slowly been converging to the Strib's.
Maybe if we had crowdsourced the original counting of the ballots we wouldn't be in this mess!
I feel that delivering an
I feel that delivering an real-time online experience carries with it a lot of responsibilities for us content creators, as well as getting users to shift to a new way of receiving data. We’ve become so accustomed to latency and delays in our connectivity, this is a hurdle we’ll have to overcome.
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Playing it straight
Now that things have calmed down a bit here in Minnesota, we've had a chance to analyze some of the data generated by our Ballot Challenge on StarTribune.com. One of the most surprising findings is how seriously people treated the exercise. Among the 4,900 users who evaluated at least 100 ballots, the mean percentage of votes awarded to Franken was 43.5%, with a standard deviation of 6.4. Excluding the more casual evaluators seems warranted because although we tried to present the ballots to users randomly, the state released the images in batches by county and city over a period of two weeks. I think the fact that we calculated a "my projection" for each user in addition to the "crowd" projection was an incentive for evaluators to stay honest. And since we allocated each ballot based on a majority vote by the crowd after 50 people had voted on it, it would take a concerted effort to flip a ballot.