[unwoundmouse]

Now that you bring that up, if we had a 100% accurate poll that would be really good for productivity wouldn't it? Perhaps it wouldn't give voters the same feeling of self-determination but it'd save a lot of resources in fundraising, going out to vote, counting votes

[bigbubba]

The sensation of self determination is the entire point of democracy though. We don't use democracy because we think masses of people are particularly wise; we use these systems because they feel more fair than the alternatives and that perception of fairness produces good results (peaceful power transitions.)

[jedberg]

I mean technically the election is a 100% accurate poll. You get data from every voter.

To run a 100% accurate poll would require you to sample every voter, so it would literally be an election.

[lordnacho]

> I mean technically the election is a 100% accurate poll. You get data from every voter.

Actually an election is literally a poll in the sense of a sample, you are counting people at "polling stations" in order to gauge the public mood about who should be president.

When you see it that way, Nate Silver is predicting a sample of an unknown distribution, the "true" distribution of people's preferences.

The fact that you can only make one officially binding sample ("the voters") is a practicality, as is the fact that there's an electoral college that means votes have different values. The fact that turnout matters is another issue, a statistician might call it a sampling problem.