[alphazard]

> I suppose there's some noise in any voting system, and it's fine if the magnitude is small and its distribution random.

This is the right answer. It's amazing how many people insist that elections have absolutely no fraud or other sources of error. In most elections throughout the world, it's apes counting paper with their squishy hands and blurry eyeballs. It's remarkable that we even get 3 significant figures reliably.

[cozzyd]

It's not unbiased noise though. People with the highest likelihood to die soon (elderly men) have different voting preferences than the general public.

[red369]

I'm not sure I'm thinking about this correctly, but I'm not sure that it's relevant that elderly men die younger than elderly women. I think it would only be a bias is they were dying at a faster rate, relative to their population size, than other groups. That is, the size of the elderly male population was shrinking compared with the elderly female population.