[EM] Why the "jury" approach is right for large public elections

[Forest Simmons]

On Fri, 27 Feb 2004, Forest Simmons wrote:

<snip>

>
> More to the point, if the sample of voters were more than ten thousand,
> then the probability of the voters in the sample being pivotal would be
> small enough that there would little incentive for them to study the
> issues carefully, given the other constraints in their lives, even if the
> pre-election polls indicated an exact 50%/50% split in opinions.
>

The "small enough" here is less than one percent.

Why not make the size of the random sample of registered voters be the
size that would give a probability of a pivotal (or tied) outcome at one
percent, given the pre-election distribution of opinion?

The closer the race, the bigger the sample, but in no case would the
sample be bigger than ten thousand.

Forest