Tuesday, February 2, 2016

Wait a minute...

Wait a minute...  In last night's Iowa caucuses, on the Democratic side there were six precincts where the ballots were tied – evenly split between The Hillary and The Bern.  So what did they do?  They tossed a coin to decide it.  That's fair enough; in a tie they break it by randomly choosing a winner.

But...

In all six of these tied precincts, The Hillary's people won the toss.  What's the chances of that?  For a geek like me, that's a trivial question.  Assuming the coin tosses really are random, there's exactly one chance in sixty-four that Hillary (or Bernie) would win all six of them.  If it had gone the other way (that is, Bernie winning all six), would that have changed the election results?  I'm not sure, as the Democrats have a less-than-transparent mechanism, population-based, for deciding how much weight to place on each precinct's votes.  If the precincts decided by a coin toss are small (in population), as is most likely, then their cumulative effect might not be enough to change the outcome.  But we don't know that – at least not now – and given the shenanigans the Clinton dynasty is justly famous for, I find that ... at least unsettling, and possibly suspicious.

I'd sure like to know whether if Bernie had won tosses, he'd be the winner...

Meanwhile, Scott Adams is broadly hinting that it's possible the Republican caucuses were rigged.  The most persuasive piece of “evidence” he offered (assuming it's accurate) is that Microsoft supplied the software that totaled the Republican results, Rubio's biggest donor was Microsoft, and Rubio is a big-but-plausible winner.  Hmmm...

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