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Wang: Minnesota race is a statistical tie

Written by Lauren Christensen, Staff Writer
Published: Thursday, December 4th, 2008
A month after votes were cast in the still-undecided U.S. Senate race in Minnesota between Republican incumbent Norm Coleman and his challenger, political commentator and former comedian Al Franken (D), voters and analysts eagerly await the result of the ...(back to the article)

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  • 10:57 p.m. on Dec. 4th, 2008
    Posted by
    Figures don't lie but liars do figure

    "In a blog post on his website, Wang said that he used binomial distribution statistics to show that the difference in votes is smaller than the standard deviation for two equally probable outcomes in a situation with a similar number of votes cast, implying that, by statistical measures, the Coleman-Franken vote is a tie."

    That's all nice and all, but you assume that the voters go in the booth and flip coins to pick a candidate. Which is a pretty darn big assumption.

    All of that doesn't mean a thing anyway, because the votes and only the votes are the only things that count. "Statistical" interpretation doesn't determine a winner.

    You can use "statistics" to "prove" anything you want.

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