re: #755 lostlakehiker

this: What are the odds that when 10001 voters vote, the election is 5001 to 5000? EQUIVALENTLY, what are the odds that when the LAST VOTER, whoever it is, steps up to the booth, the votes already cast have split 5000 to 5000?

Why on earth do you think that’s a question that matters a lot?

Did you really not get the point of the whole 10,000 vs 10,001 votes thing?

The ‘deciding vote’ thing is a fallacy.

Yes. You bribe the CA voter in a tight rice. Or spend more resources. So what? What does that have to do with what I was saying?

You seem to somehow be offering this extremely limited 1/4000th chance of tipping an election, assuming it all breaks 50/50 AND assuming an odd number of total votes, as somehow equivalent or palliative to the over-representation of the small states in the senate, which is a dead certainty, every time. There is never a time where a senator from Wyoming is not representation fewer people, by an order of magnitude.

So, one single voter can be treated as having a 1/4000 chance to be the ‘deciding vote’— that they vote in an election that winds up in a tie.

That means if he started voting at 18 and dropped dead at 78, he’d have a 1/160 chance of running into a perfect tie in his state in his lifetime of voting in presidential elections, if he voted in every single one.

So what? I mean, never mind the fact that if one guy’s vote is the deciding vote, another guy’s vote can’t be, because you have to know what every other vote is in the case of a tie in order to crown one guy’s vote the deciding vote. They can’t all be simultaneously the deciding vote, otherwise, if two of them both switch their ‘deciding vote’, you get bupkus.

It’s interesting that the odds of a single person affecting a tie are higher than you might naively think. They are still intensely small, and they still have nothing to do with the fact that the senators for the smaller states represent far fewer people than those from the larger ones.