Does anyone have the numbers that were current when the networks jumped the gun on election night? - the early morning problem. Here is the problem. When I went to bed at 1:15 EST, I had been told by the talking heads - that, totaling 5 million, 90% of the Florida vote was in; - that Bush had an 80,000 vote margin; and - (less formally) that Gore needed 2/3 of the rest of the votes to win. Errors at 1:15: a) If 90% were in, then Gore would need only 60% (not 66%) of the rest, 300,000 to 200,000, to overcome the lead. Not quite so hard. b) Also, assuming that 5 million is 90% of what ended up as 6 million, implies an underestimate of almost half a million. That seems serious: they are trying to estimate a fraction in a "finite population" but badly misguess the final N, even as they near the end. Details at 2:16: The most detail I have seen: A NY Times article said that Bush led by 58 thousand, with 98% of the ballots counted, when Fox Network proclaimed Bush the winner, followed within 5 minutes by the others. Did they base the call on what precincts (or counties?) were still incomplete? or on the gross count? I have never seen a number for the total votes that were on hand - and thus, how many they thought were yet to come in. Were they surprised by a large number of votes from known areas? (I have read that the Black vote was up by a huge amount; my guess, incidentally, is that first-time voters contribute quite a bit to the punch vote errors in Black precincts.) Or were they crudely mis-estimating the total vote? I have read that several networks are unhappy with the performance of VNS [see below], and also that VNS may be serving as scapegoat. - Other background - The call (for Gore) at 7:50 p.m. was based on odd exit polls -- there seems to have been an accidentally skewed sample -- plus some tabulation/transcription error of the earliest vote totals. (I suspect, but I haven't heard, that the later error was committed by someone who was not 'blind' to the exit-poll result.) The call at 2:16 a.m. (for Bush) originated at the call-desk of Fox, and was followed quite shortly by the other networks. Voter News Service is the 'network exit poll consortium' that provides the raw numbers for the networks and AP. According to Richard Morin in the Wash. Post (Nat. Weekly Edition, 20 Nov.), VNS sent out a press release at about 3:00 to 'withdraw' the call, but they had never made that call at all, at any time; it was the networks. When it was first formed, VNS provided numbers and made all the calls; but after ABC jumped the gun with a few scoops in 1994, all the others hired statisticians, etc., and set up their own 'call' desks for election night. Morin does not go into detail about how much the network guys do rely on VNS, any more, for actual calls. I don't know whether there is much time lag between the network calls, these days, but my impression is, "not much." Now, I am wondering, "Were these guys as bad at 2:16+ as what I saw before I went to bed at 1:15?" -- Rich Ulrich, [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pitt.edu/~wpilib/index.html ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list and remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES are available at http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ =================================================================
