According To MSNBC, If Online Voters Support Ron Paul, Their Votes Count Less
from the msnbc:-bad-at-math dept
First thing's first: let's face up to the fact that online polls (especially on political issues) are pretty close to meaningless. However, Jamey Fletcher points us to a rather amazing graphical mess perpetrated by MSNBC in response to Ron Paul supporters flooding the vote for its online poll concerning who won the recentThank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: graphs, journalism, ron paul
Companies: comcast, msnbc, nbc
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Re:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/06/15/985292/-Jon-Stewart-mocks-the-GOP-candidates-d ebate-and-CNN
Seriously Ron Paul has ZERO chance of being elected and is rightfully ignored. Now, talking about why the GOP/libertarian faithful continue to vote for him anyway in polls is fair game, but his candidacy is not a serious one and never has been.
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actual video of Ron Paul flubbing the answer to "Do 5 yr old children get emergency medical care?"
at 1:45 of the video.
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Last time I studied Greek history, grooming the field of options was not the foundation of Democracy.
"Ron Paul has ZERO chance of being elected and is rightfully ignored"
All due respect, but I don't want you, nor Roger Ailes, nor some other boneheaded news director telling me who is, and who isn't viable.
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Online polls
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Re: Online polls
http://panopticlick.eff.org/
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But the fact that Americans are being robbed by the media of making an unbiased and properly informed choice about the merits of Ron Paul as a presidential candidate is disgusting and horrifying beyond belief.
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fixed that for you. at least they let him in this poll.
Being a netizen = second class voter. Didn't anyone tell you? hell, any cyberstoner could have explained that one. We're all a bunch of crazy kids, overvoting to upset the scales of democracy on our stupid little issues that no one wants to hear about.
A commenter on obama's last town hall put it best: "Oh look, those crazy stoners are at it again, hahaha! ....no seriously F*** you."
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because once you disregard Mr. Paul you can decide what to get for lunch and your fantasy football lineup. Therefore, by leaving people like Ron out of the media, you never need to think about the candidates who have views different than that of AmericA.
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For example it's coded that 1% of the vote = certain width, but then there's a maximum possible length on the bar. The expected result was that the winner would probably be about 30% or so given the large # of options, but Ron Paul at 50% has far surpassed that and is hitting up against the max width the bar can handle.
The better way to do it though is to have the high % be a full bar and proportion everything else based off that.
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Remember, even if it capped out graphically at 30%, Ron Paul would still have a graph ~180% the size of Romneys....
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That's the way that runs into trouble and is what I described. If 1% = X pixels then someone with a huge % would have a very long bar which might break formatting. So you put a max width on the bar. Then Ron Paul gets 60% of the votes and is capped by the max width.
If Ron Paul's bar was accurate and 1% = the # of pixels it does now, then it'd be pushing out the articles width pretty significantly.
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It looks like they give a percentage width to the bars where width% = just under 2* vote %
With Ron Paul over 50% he is maxed at 100% width.
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While you're making corrections, Mike, lose the gratuitous apostrophe from "things". <== punctuation Nazi here (no, humorously referring to myself as a punctuation Nazi does not invoke Godwin's law :)
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So easy
Take the poll option that "won" and make its bar 250px long, regardless of how much it won by, its actual value, etc.
Take each poll option that didn't "win" and make it proportional to the winning bar by percentage:
50.8% = 250px (winner)
17 = 84px ((17/50.8)*250)
14.1 = 69px ((14.1/50.8)*250)
etc etc etc
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Based on what I'm seeing in terms of the width %'s of the bars, and the actual %'s, it's maxed at 50%.
However, the current graph has a much bigger difference than the original, which would suggest it was probably much lower before.
So yeah, crappy code is atleast part of it. However, such polls are extremely easy to make, and it's very easy math to make the top vote always 100% and the bottom votes proportionate to it. It's almost kind of neglate to have the code so bad, although one could say it's not really that important overall.
-Ron Paul supporter more worried about false misrepresentation of issues than the length on bar charts. They show the %'s, that's good enough for me.
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Its really pretty simple
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If you look at the source, Santorum has a 2% wide bar to Bachmann's 3% wide bar -- despite Bachmann having twice the votes and neither having over 2% of the votes.
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That must have been terrifying.
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It is obvious the graph is accurate and the numbers are wrong clearly Ron Paul has approx 5% - 6% more of the vote, which can easily be explained by Ron Paul fanatics gaming the system. Mitt Romney will be the next GOP candidate, now go back to watching American Idol and Jersey Shore. We will take care of everything.
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If the graph was presented with Ron Paul 50% as is, the lower 3 or 4 items would be indistinguishable one from the other.
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Yes. They would all look like they got their ass handed to them by Paul.
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CSS
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If I were making the chart with one bar so much bigger than the others, I'd opt for a broken axis. It would look the same scalewise as what MSNBC is showing, but it would be more obvious that the Paul value was substantially greater than the others. Putting the actual percentages on the bars helps, but for the numbers-challenged, it is misleading.
This is kind of chart making 101...but what do I know, I'm just a data monkey.
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Everyone like pie.
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The sort of psuedo-intellectual cultism fosters that kind of extremism that would do petty things like overload polls with Ron Paul.
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Is that what happened in the Iowa straw poll?
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Ron Paul is Ignored by the Media
I do not agree with all of Paul's policies and I'm not certain if I would vote for him. However, he is the only candidate that ever makes clear and plain sense and doesn't spew partisan rhetoric.
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Re: Ron Paul is Ignored by the Media
People fear anything but the status quo. Even when they can see that the status quo is bad quo.
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They keep drawing attention
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It was very strange, listening to several Republican analysts talking about the Straw Poll and completely ignoring the #2 guy.
I disagree with 90% of what Ron Paul has to say, but this is ridiculous.
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American Republicans
If I were American, I would vote Democrat, or Ron Paul. Most of what Ron Paul says makes a lot of sense and could improve America powerfully. The Tea Party and both their candidates will reverse progress and inflict their religious values by shaming opposition and distorting truth through the eyes of the ultra privileged.
I am interested in opinion about Ron Paul vs Obama which would at least be a clear choice, and agree this graph is "normalised against media expectation" which although very inaccurate does reflect a rather large margin for error in the poll.
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Terminology
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In order to claim a conspiracy, we would have to believe that the following things are true: 1) That the original graph displayed normally, showing Ron Paul with a massive lead. 2) That someone at MSNBC actually cared about an online graph. 3) That MSNBC was then willing to change the graph just to minimize Ron Paul's results. Not the graph itself (which would constantly be updated), but the underlying code.
This sounds very far fetched to me. The more plausible explanation is formatting error that has trouble mapping the difference between 1% and 50% to proper scale.
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Similiar
Common attitude is that "it would be cool to elect him, just to see what happens, but only if there is a save/load feature for reality". I think the same is true about Ron Paul :) I, as a citizen of different country, would love to see him as the next American Top Guy, but if I lived in USA, I would probably never vote for him.
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Ron Paul 2012
He's got a swell of followers and is growing as the only logical choice with a chance to beat Obama. But he represents real change and will upset the status quo.
NY Sun article this am
http://www.nysun.com/editorials/ron-pauls-secret-weapon/87479/
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One look at the chart pretty much tells the story: They have a limited amount of space, the programmer likely expected results similar to the general polling, and assumed nobody would poll much better than about 25%. The layout of the graphic is bar + numbers, side by side. The space for the numbers is fixed minimum, the space for the bar is variable based on it's length, and is limited mostly by the size of the numbers area.
It also looks like they used some adjustment factor to make sure there was enough resolution at the low end, where they expected most of the candidate to poll. Removing the Ron Paul 50% result, and allowing the charge to adjust with no result larger than 25 would likely make it look much better.
Technically, you can look at it and see what happened, it's not hard.
There is no conspiracy against Ron Paul. If anything, there would appear to be a conspiracy from Ron Paul supporters to bomb every poll possible to make it look like more people support Ron than really do.
I do find it interesting that Mike has finally made his political leanings clear. If the name with 50% was Sarah Palin, I doubt this would even get posted here.
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so this isn't a tech story, right:
"One look at the chart pretty much tells the story: They have a limited amount of space, the programmer likely expected results similar to the general polling, and assumed nobody would poll much better than about 25%"
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However, I will say that I feel proud that months ago I pointed out that Mike was probably a tea bagger. It seems to be turning out to be true.
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Mike slaps his balls against other people's faces? I had no idea. I need to go back and read this article more carefully...
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All others bars are calculated based on Ron Paul's percentage.
example Mitt Romney bar width = 24% i.e (13.9*100)/58.9 = approx 23.5
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clearly you don't follow any logic
"pointed out that Mike was probably a tea bagger."
Is that illegal now?
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