[EM] Historical perspective about FairVote organization

[Richard Fobes]

On 3/18/2013 2:00 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
> On 03/17/2013 06:32 PM, Richard Fobes wrote:
...
>> My VoteFair site collects lots of data. [...]
...
>
> Could we use the polling data to get some information about, say,
> candidate variety? I think we could, at least to some extent. We could
> ask something like "how many elections with more than 20 voters have no
> CW?". I think you published stats like that once, but I don't remember
> what the values were.

I have not published anything from this data.  I'm not in the academic 
world so I don't have time to anonoymize (sp?) it, or do any special 
analysis.

> Perhaps you could also ask the voters some time later if they were
> satisfied with the choice. That kind of "later polling" could uncover
> Burlington-type breakdowns if there were any. If they could rank the
> options in retrospect, it would also be possible to determine whether
> they would have been satisfied with, say, IRV; but I imagine that's too
> much to ask.

Somewhat related: There is a website named IdolAnalytics.com that 
analyzes the correlation between American Idol polls and the actual 
TV-show results (who gets eliminated) and compares the results for 
different polls.  Here is a quote about the VoteFair American Idol polls 
from last year:

“People complaining about your site's sampling are being ridiculous. 
Your site selected 20/30 bottom group contestants and 5/12 eliminated 
contestants correctly (excluding the finale).  That's better than any 
other single index that I assessed, including Dialidol and Zabasearch. 
No poll is perfect.  Your site clearly captures a significant part of 
the voting.”

Now I need to stop spending too much time in this forum and get back to 
supporting real-life voting.  Alas, more people vote in the American 
Idol poll than the Presidential polls I've conducted, but that means 
more people are learning how voting should be done (without the blinding 
distractions of left-versus-right politics).

Richard Fobes