Posts by Bart Janssen
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Legal Beagle: Election 2017: the Special…, in reply to ,
I don’t understand how that works. Dont the smaller party's get any?
What linger said.
yes the smaller parties theoretically get some of the benefit but say for this election 46% of those votes go to National 36% go to Labour and the others get the scraps.
More specifically the seats are handed out according to the vote proportion - it is possible for only the two biggest parties to get any of those seats.
The greatest benefit of excluding those votes accrues to the biggest parties - which of course is why the rule will never change.
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Legal Beagle: Election 2017: the Special…, in reply to Jason Kemp,
But then we add that back into the calculation.
No, we add it back to the big parties. The actual opinions of those voters has been discarded.
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One of the weirdest things about the discussions of who will form a coalition with whom has been the idea that it's a bad thing for one party to have to compromise.
But compromise is good, we teach our kids to compromise to reach a consensus solution to a problem, we reach compromises in business and our day to day jobs.
Compromises are about recognising that some things are very important to other people and other groups.
Surely we want our representatives in parliament to understand compromise and work towards achieving a government that can make appropriate and fair compromises.
All the talk of bottom lines and lines in the sand is just childish (looking at you MSM).
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If he threshold was 1% more people would vote for those minor parties BECAUSE their vote would count.
Same applies to a transferable vote system.
But it won't happen because those votes would come from National and Labour and they won't allow such a change to be made.
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Hard News: The Day After Tomorrow, in reply to Katharine Moody,
We're better than that.
Are we? Really?
Lets be honest.
We let the Roast busters get away with rape.
We let the dairy farmers in Canterbury steal water and destroy rivers.
We let a housing bubble continue.
We let our poorest live in cold damp crowded homes.
We let children go to school unfed.
We let our health system fail our most needy.
We let Christchurch fester after the earthquakes.We can blame this National government all we like but we chose that government by either not voting or actually voting to allow these things.
We all made small choices that enabled this.
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Hard News: The Day After Tomorrow, in reply to Russell Brown,
I think it's been their problem all along: all about policy, hardly ever about people.
There's a part of me that responds to the desire to focus on ideas rather than personality.
BUT
First don't be a dick
And second, you are going to be met with surprises in government, situations will arise that you can't predict. So personality comes into play for the voter who needs to know how you are likely to respond.
TOP failed on both counts.
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Hard News: Where are all the polls at?, in reply to Dennis Frank,
myth of scientific objectivity
There have been studies that show pretty compellingly that people who believe themselves to be objective (eg scientists) are more subject to confirmation bias than average.
However, when making comments on the meaning of data there is a difference between comments made from knowledge and comments made from ignorance. Both can be wrong but one is more likely to be wrong than the other. I rarely trust my accountant* to advise me on medical matters.
*lol as if I'd have an accountant.
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Speaker: Polling 2017: life beyond landlines?, in reply to Gavin White,
if a poll shows NZ First (as the classic example) 1% below their final result that doesn't necessarily mean it was wrong
Absolutely. 1% here or there is perfectly fine with this kind of sampling.
The problem is we are seeing 10% differences and that realistically means one or more polls are very wrong.
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The key problem is these are samples that try to replicate the result you would get from polling every person who can vote (the actual election). The question is -
"Is the sample accurate?"
Accuracy is about how close the sample is to the "real" result of polling everyone.The problem we have is that we have one "real" result every election, and multiple samples (polls) each giving different answers. There are two options, either the samples are "real" and the population as a whole is changing it's opinion by huge jumps from poll to poll OR the samples are not accurate.
Margins of error allow you to give a fudge around the number but the margins themselves can be fraught. But ultimately if your samples don't reflect the "real" result then you're doing it wrong.
At present you have to conclude one or more of the polling companies is doing it wrong - pretty badly wrong as well.
It makes for easy entertainment and fills minutes on the news - but personally I don't think it adds any value to our democracy and could well be doing harm.
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Just a comment about margins of error. At risk of 'splaining, most folks assume that the margin of error means the "real" result will be the stated number plus or minus the margin of error.
But these errors have a bunch of assumptions and what they really mean is the "real" number is PROBABLY within that range but it could be well outside that given number.
But there are other issues, a passing familiarity with stats should tell you that the margin should be smaller on the zero side. That is, if the number given is 20% then it should be +say 5% and minus say 3%, so right up front you know the margin of error is calculated in an unusual manner and you should treat it with suspicion.
But the biggest problem with those margins is they make assumptions about the sampling. They assume the sample is random and the survey companies are struggling with that now. They also assume the samples have certain distributions (remember normal distributions from school?).
Those assumptions are necessary to do simple stats but it's never certain the assumptions are valid.
It's possible to do better statistics and my guess is internal party polling probably uses much more sophisticated models and error reporting but statistics makes most folks head hurt and the media is just plain reluctant to try and present anything complex.
The result is, these entertainment polls with silly margins of error. They make for entertainment and sound bites and tweets but as for actually representing the opinion of the population - they're horrible.