> The large size by itself does not guarantee correctness
That's true for "reasonable" poll sizes. As your poll size increases past a certain point, it does begin to guarantee correctness.
An election is a poll with the size of all eligible voters.
That's true for "reasonable" poll sizes. As your poll size increases past a certain point, it does begin to guarantee correctness.
An election is a poll with the size of all eligible voters.
"Official" election results were giving Tsikhanoyskaya around half a million votes while over 1 million Telegram users with Belarusian phone numbers already said that they voted for her.
Se here https://t.me/telegrambelarus/9
> An election is a poll with the size of all eligible voters.
I think you're oversimplifying the situation. Clearly, sample size alone doesn't have that much of a correctness guarantee, or according to your own statement, we'd be able to trust the official results.
People are not complaining because the election is a biased sample of the population (not possible because by definition an election is open to all eligible voters).
People are complaining because they believe the government is not truthfully reporting the actual election results.
Good polling technique cannot mitigate fraud.
If there is an issue with the underlying polling technique, making the sample larger does not guarantee more correctness. You simply end up with a larger set of bad data.
The poll itself says 59% of the 2.3m respondents were people who voted in the election.
That's 1.4m people, which is 15% of their population and 21% of their eligible voting population.
But that’s not what I was taking issue with. Above, I was disputing the claim that a large sample size “guarantees correctness”
Likely, neither this Telegram poll nor the election are statistically sound in their results, for different reasons.
I am not saying that the Telegram poll has to be statistically sound to be valuable evidence.
2. This sample in the Telegram poll is ~20% the number of voters in Belarus.
Nonetheless, I don't doubt the validity of these particular results, because I think we have enough corroborating evidence. We don't have to justify the rigorousness of a Telegram poll to come to that same conclusion.
For instance people in the US still use text-messaging to a significant percentage. That's hard for me to believe as well.
It's no use looking at Telegram's world usage, that's for sure.
Also what about all the babushkas who most likely voted for Lukashenko but don't have a smartphone?
This is not to say that more people didn't vote for the opposition than the official numbers state. But Lukashenko still could have won.
There are many ways that could happen. But it's pretty good evidence to add to the context, and the pile of evidence was already quite big.
Telegram users are not going to pass any "Randomness" scrutiny. For all we know, Telegram User A asks Telegram User B to take the poll, etc. That's not random, and can introduce all sorts of statistical bias.
While I don't believe in Belarus official results, that Telegram evidence is not a real evidence. It's just a hint.
Otherwise you can only draw your error bars equally in both ways at once, and then they need to be pretty large before the numbers stop saying what they clearly are saying.
If a poll shows 80% for candidate A, you’d only need to hit 62.5% of the population to guarantee that candidate A would hit 50% of the vote even if the remaining 47.5% voted for other candidates.
Not really though.
An election is ostensibly 'perfect sample of the electorate' (assuming everyone voted), which is what makes it 'good'.
It's very easy to get a 'very large sample size' that is still 'very inaccurate'.
In this case, we're talking about potential numbers larger than literal voters, which makes it interesting - but the sample size again is not the issues if we're looking at a 'poll'.