For those of you who are not particularly aware of it, for the last year and a half I’ve been writing this column called Election Metrics for Mint. It’s basically a quantitative take on elections, and in my estimate I should’ve written over 50 pieces for them so far.
The last two pieces, however, have been different in the sense that I have now moved beyond covering Indian elections to look at elections abroad. In my last but one post, published last month, i took a look at potential cheating in Afghan elections. (Now I remember linking to that piece from here).
Now, in the latest piece that was published today I look at the forthcoming Scottish referendum, and a recent poll by YouGov in which 47% of respondents said they wanted to vote in favour of independence. I use some binomial jugglery that shows that this translates to a 2.5% chance of a Yes vote, which while insignificant, is an order of magnitude higher than the 0.0004% chance of “Yes” that can be implied from an earlier poll.
I then use the “possible, plausible and probable” framework made famous by Bill Gurley and Aswath Damodaran in their “exchange” in July to show why this poll is significant (it shows that a “Yes” vote is “plausible”, while earlier it was possible but definitely not plausible).