In this Quibans you may want to copy the images so you can project them one at a time. The questions can then be posed verbally.
In the USA’s presidential election, because of the time
differences across the country, the polls close on the east coast earlier than
elsewhere and they start counting the votes and releasing the results while
voting is still taking place in other states.
I expected the states in New England (the north-east of the
US) to support Joe Biden, so I was very surprised in the early hours of the
following morning to see, on the election webpage of the Wall Street Journal,
this (as a ticker running across the screen):
A1) It would be usual to think of this as “Trump has 23.1%
more than Biden”. But we need to be
careful. If Biden has 100,000 votes,
does that mean Trump has 123,100 votes?
Or does it mean that Trump’s lead divided by the total number of votes
cast is 23.1% ? We would usually refer
to the latter as a lead of “23.1 percentage points” to avoid confusion.
After my surprise at this huge lead, I clicked on the image
of the state of New Hampshire to get further information:
A2) So far, 26 votes have been counted! Just 26.
And 16 of those went to Trump, while only 10 were for Biden.
The difference between 61.5% and 38.5% is 23.0% - so there
must be some rounding involved.
16/26 = 0.61538…, and 10/26 = 0.384615…, so Trump’s figure
has been rounded down and Biden’s rounded up, and when we subtract we get 0.230769…,
which rounds to 23.1
An alternative way to get this value is to do 6/26 (where
the numerator is the difference between 16 and 10).
It says that 1.0% of the expected total vote has been
reported. If it’s exactly 1% then we
would expect 2600 votes to be cast in the state of New Hampshire altogether. Using the upper and lower bounds of 1.0% we
get:
26/0.0095 = 2736.8 – so the upper bound for the total number
of votes is 2736 (mustn’t round up!)
26/0.0105 = 2476.1 – so the lower bound for the total number
of votes is 2477 (must round up!)
That seems like a small number!
Here is the current state of play in New Hampshire:
Q4) How many percentage points is Biden leading by?
Q5) How many votes are still uncounted?
Q6) Biden won all 4 of the electoral college votes from New
Hampshire. Why might that be considered
unfair?
A3) They have counted 803,831 votes so far – which is a long
way above our upper bound of 2736 ! (And Biden managed to overturn Trump’s 6-vote
lead!)
A4) Biden is leading Trump by 59,275 votes. Dividing this by the 803,831 votes counted
gives us 0.07374…, which is a lead of 7.37 percentage points.
A5) I am deeply suspicious of the figure for the percentage
of votes that have been counted, but if we take it as correct we get that
830,831 is between 98.95% and 99.05%
830,831 / 0.9895 = 812,360 (rounding down)
830,831 / 0.9905 = 811,541 (rounding up)
Hence, there are between 7710 and 8529 still to count.
A6) The way the US Presidential election system works, each
state votes and then (for 48 of the 50 states) the electoral college votes for
that state all go to the winner of the state.
In the election in 2000 the state of Florida was won by a margin of only
500 votes. That gave all of the
electoral college votes for Florida (25 of them – because Florida has a greater
population than New Hampshire) to George W. Bush and resulted in him winning
the election.
In New Hampshire, Biden benefited (he got 53% of the votes
but 100% of the electoral college votes), whereas in other states Trump
benefited from the system. In the 2016
election Hillary Clinton won more votes than Donald Trump, but ended up with
fewer electoral college votes, so Trump was the winner.
Here is the final map from 2020:
A7) I think there appears to be more red. But because the very big red states in the
north have small populations, the number of electoral votes for the blue states
(Biden) significantly exceeds the red states (Trump).
The Wall Street Journal provides this as an alternative version of the map:
A8) The map has been scaled to show one square for each
electoral college vote. (You may want to
flick back and forth between the real map and this one. Montana is a particular casualty!). Now there is more blue.
Source: https://www.wsj.com/election-results-2020/live-coverage.html
