Ain't that the truth?

Today's Mallard Fillmore. (As I write this I cannot post a link that will show the comic. I'll try again tomorrow.)

On a related note, Eject! Eject! Eject! sent me over to IowaHawk for an interesting post on the subject of polls:

You take a simple random sample of 1000 balls from an urn containing 120,000,000 red and blue balls, and your sample shows 450 red balls and 550 blue balls. Construct a 95% confidence interval for the true proportion of blue balls in the urn." …Works pretty well if you're interested in hypothetical colored balls in hypothetical giant urns, or survival rates of plants in a controlled experiment, or defects in a batch of factory products. It may even work well if you're interested in blind cola taste tests. But what if the thing you are studying doesn't quite fit the balls & urns template? • What if 40% of the balls have personally chosen to live in an urn that you legally can't stick your hand into?
• What if 50% of the balls who live in the legal urn explicitly refuse to let you select them?
• What if the balls inside the urn are constantly interacting and talking and arguing with each other, and can decide to change their color on a whim?
• What if you have to rely on the balls to report their own color, and some unknown number are probably lying to you?
• What if you've been hired to count balls by a company who has endorsed blue as their favorite color?
• What if you have outsourced the urn-ball counting to part-time temp balls, most of whom happen to be blue?
• What if the balls inside the urn are listening to you counting out there, and it affects whether they want to be counted, and/or which color they want to be? (And what, I wonder, if all around you, every day, you are told by all of the coolest, hippest, prettiest balls that your color is mean, irrelevant, unpopular, un-cool, evil, old, incompetent and probably racist? Would you stick to your guns in the face of that, or keep your mouth shut and show ‘em when the curtain closes?)

...If one or more of the above statements are true, then the formula for margin of error simplifies to Margin of Error = Who the hell knows? The moral of this midterm for all would-be pollsters: if you are really interested in how many of us red and blue balls there are in this great big urn, sit back and relax until Tuesday, and let us show our true colors.

(BTW, that is actually quoted from Eject! Eject! Eject!'s post. Go read the entire thing. The part about statistics may make your head swim--I was sooooo lucky to be able to take the Sociology Department's Stats class instead of the Math Department's--but it is a good description of why polls in general are less than scientific, not just the ones on the intarwebz all your friends send you a link to and encourage you to "Go Vote Right Now!")

I also note that the polls that are trumpeted in the press all claim the Obamunist's lead is widening, but I keep stumbling across polls by well-known organizations (Zogby, for one) that claim the McCain (AKA Col. Tigh, for any Battlestar fans) has already caught up and may indeed be passing The Chosen One.

As an aside, recent elections have left me conflicted about the Electoral College. A straightforward description of it, it's history and it's workings, makes it obvious that it is, in fact, obsolete in an era of modern communications. On the other hand, a simple head-counting popular vote means that Southern Left Coast and the Least Coast Megalopolis elect the President and the rest of us just vote for the hell of it.